Girl of My Dreams (41 page)

It was a good question as to what was going to happen. Another telegram.

MEETING OF BIGGIES, MAYOR, TEAMSTER HEAD, BRIDGES STOP RUMORS FLY BRIDGES LIFE IN DANGER STOP REGARDS QUIN

How sweet Mike Quin should pester me just when I was trying to give some shape to the shapeless. I struggled on, sneaked in a little more labor-management strife van Moylan wanted though nothing that would make Clifford Odets jealous. Van Moylan liked it even better with his mark on it. He took it to Goddard Minghoff who killed it outright. “A strike by any other name still smells as rotten as Red politics.
Verboten,
” he told Janny. Janny said he was sorry he made me put in more strike. I was just telling him to forget it, this is part of my education, when we heard someone scream, “FIRE!”

We all ran outside and at first saw nothing. When word was passed to Musso & Frank's restaurant, the legendary Hollywood watering hole, that part of the Jubilee studio was on fire, Jack Gilbert, the great silents star whose high-pitched voice ruined his career by disqualifying him from talkies, squeaked into his martini he hoped it was a sound stage that was burning. It was no sound stage. Alas, it was New York.

Everyone rushed to the back lot, where two fire trucks were already on the scene. They were too late. New York Street, as it was known, was burning up fast. The brownstone façades, the corner deli, the cigar store, the stoops where so many kids had played jacks and marbles, so many ingénues had been kissed good night by so many ardent leading men, the nightclub entrance with neon lights that had, depending on the production, blazed Delmonico's, Stork Club, or El Morocco, the Wall Street brokerage, the church steeple, orphanage, row of elegant town houses—all these were shooting flames, and the flames ate more ravenously because their nourishment, after all, was not marble and concrete or even solid wood but mostly
papier-mâché
and beaverboard.

“Cott! Superbe! I loff eet! Vut ve got makes me zo heppy! How do you doing, I'm Josef von Sternberg.” This was Largo Buchalter entertaining his actors and crew who had raced off their own set to watch the end of New York Street. Von Sternberg, who had brought over Marlene Dietrich from Germany and been quickly eclipsed by his protégé, was reduced to bragging about past glories in Europe and begging for work in what he called Hollehvood. He was the butt of jokes from those who exulted in schadenfreude
.

Tutor Beedleman, who had written the script Buchalter was shooting, strolled up to Buchalter's team to ask how things were going on the set. Instead of introducing him to the cast, most of whom didn't know the writers on the lot, Largo made Tutor the butt of his next crack. “Would you believe it?” he crowed as flames licked into the New York Stock Exchange. “This man could have been the most distinguished rabbi in America if avarice and alcohol plus an insatiable need for hookers hadn't blurred his vision?”

Curtt Weigerer came over to tell Buchalter to get his crew back to work. “Here he is,” Largo said, “only child of a loveless match between a meat cleaver and a fly swatter.”

He had something there, I thought.

Spotting me on the fringes of Largo's group, Weigerer reminded me he still hadn't received my expense account for San Francisco. “Most of it was stolen by scabs working on the waterfront where I was doing research,” I said, “right before one of them stabbed me.” Weigerer could see I was still walking with an obvious limp. The head production manager steamed. I had no idea where my remark about theft came from. But as we watched a bowling alley and automat condense to cinders, I knew that suddenly and unexpectedly, I had learned how to lie. “Welcome to Hollywood,” Largo said as a police station keeled over while the row of town houses tottered.

“Oh no,” I heard a middle-aged woman say to her husband, “you don't suppose it'll spread to Colonial Street, do you Dwight?” The two were visitors on the lot and might have been relatives of construction workers or minor players. The husband shrugged. “Well, Ruth Ann, I just hope the wind don't spread it over to Tombstone.” His wife was starting to sob. “They're robbing our history, Dwight, it's who we are as Americans. There goes New York. Please Jesus don't let them take Colonial Street.”

Goddard Minghoff and Dunster Clapp were huddled near one of the fire trucks. Minghoff was being practical. “We'll have to suspend on two pictures with New York exteriors,” he said. Clapp was in the mood for vengeance. “I'll get the bastard that did this,” he said, “string him up by his balls.” They didn't notice Mossy, who had joined them. “I wonder if we'll ever know,” he mused to his minions, “much more than we know right now. New York burned us, and someone decided to burn it right back.”

The flames leaped toward a Chinese laundry and a pool hall as the fire department began to control it. They were able to confine the conflagration to New York after all; Paris, London, China were all spared, as well as the rest of the United States. Dwight and Ruth Ann could reassure their friends in Muncie or Cedar Rapids. A row of tenements collapsed, but Fifth Avenue apartment façades, with canopies supported by brass poles, were unscathed. Across New York Street, the tenements shriveled to ashes, confirming that the poor suffer most in disasters.

“Palmyra Millevoix skipped the fire,” Tutor Beedleman said as we walked back to the writers building. As if I hadn't noticed her absence. She stayed in the dressing room on her set when everyone else ran out to see the show. Achilles sulking in the tent? Or was she, as she liked to put it, found in thought? A sucker for punishment, I went to her set because I hadn't seen her since the day I'd spied the dreadful telegram to Mossy and she told me to get lost, or that's how I came to see it. Millie and Millie's nursemaid Costanza were just leaving after a visit; Pammy hadn't dashed out because she didn't want Millie to see the fire and be frightened into nightmares.

Mother and daughter were finishing a book together, each reciting successive sentences. “When the fisherman put his little boat away at sunset,” Millie read, “he noticed his tar-tar-tarp?”—“tarpaulin,” Pammy prompted—“was neatly folded.” “He knew,” Pammy read, “that he hadn't left it that way in the morning, so he raced home to his cottage not letting himself even hope who he would find there.” “In less time than it takes for a fish to jump out of the sea,” Millie read, “the lonely fisherman was lonely no more, for the girl of his dreams had returned from the faraway mountain and was lighting the wood in his stove for their dinner.”

Millie looked up at me strangely. “I don't know you. You're not my father.”

“Oh,” I said and began to back out the dressing room door. What misery had led the girl to that statement? Anything I'd done? Quick as I was to blame myself, I didn't think I was the cause. What, then, had led this unfrightened normally happy little girl to say that? But she saw me retreating and before her mother could jump in with a reprimand to her or an apology to me, Millie said, “Uncle O, when did you come in?”

From what mountain of her own had she returned? “Your reading is getting so good,” I said, “I'd come from a faraway mountain myself just to hear you read.”

“Mrs. Pammy,” Costanza said, “if we gonna pick out a present for Millie to bring to the birthday party, we better vamoose.” As a Filipina, Costanza was a favorite of Pammy's both for her loyalty and as someone with whom she could speak Spanish. Unlike the starched, white-uniformed nannies then popular among successful movie people, Costanza carried within her an exotic flavor that mixed Asia with Europe, serenity with impulse. When Millie almost hugged me but kept her distance, I tried to avoid making a little count of the reasons I wished I really were her father.

“Almost eight,” Pammy said to me when they'd left. “All I remember is her clinging to my breasts like a bumblebee. I respected her for how much she wanted to live off me, but she stung me down to my toes. Do I sound okay? I had polyps taken out of my nose yesterday and I can't tell if I still have a voice?”

I said she sounded fine. Actually, she seemed a trifle hoarse, like a torch singer, which I found sexy. Perhaps today her voice was merely sparkling wine. She wore a pearl-colored silk dressing gown that crossed just above her breasts, revealing more than I dared look at. “But it's too soon after surgery for you to try,” I said.

“Hush,” she said, “Let's sing.” She said that when she wanted to break a mood.

She went over to the little upright she had in the dressing room. Pammy's contract stipulated there had to be a piano anyplace the studio put her, even in a small dressing room on a sound stage. “RCA wants a new recording of ‘Born Blue,'” she said. “With a fresh chorus to add to the old. The album is ready and waiting except for this song. There are some new notes in this version. I want to kick it a bit.”

“But then won't it be more Hollywood than blues?”

“Thanks. Don't apologize, I probably needed to hear that. My excuse is times are changing and this isn't 1931 anymore. Times are a little more up-tempo. Why shouldn't my song keep up with that? Anyway, have a look at the lyrics.”

“I don't think I want to,” I said.

Pammy put the sheet music over her mouth. “I forgot about the telegram. I'm so sorry I put you through that, Owen.” She laid a hand—a condescending hand, but I treasured the touch—on my arm. She chuckled. “Don't worry, this isn't a love song, it's still a sad one. Anyway, I'm furious at Mossy over the pay cuts, which I can't believe he needed. I'm breaking it off with him. He's a scoundrel and he can go chase a starlet or slink home to poor Esther Leah if she'll have him. She's taken the children to Baltimore to visit her family, and I'm absolutely flushing the bastard out of my life next weekend. Take a look while I try out my pipes.”

She put the sheet music in front of me, handwritten with her notes penciled and her lyrics in ink. “Brand new ‘Born Blue,'” I said.

“Warners couldn't resculpt Rin Tin Tin,” she said, “but they could do it to me. I was mad after their goddamned plastic surgery, and sad. I was suspended, my new country was in the dumps. That led to ‘Born Blue' originally, down below your ankles blues. I've been fiddling, so here goes. Do you think these stanzas might help?”

Pammy wasn't normally pretentious. I found it curious—annoying even—that she said stanzas and not verses or chorus.

She played and sang:

The gay things I recall—

Late spring and early fall—

Gave me joy and joyful clues,

Gave me all that I could choose.

Singing to the sunrise, to the sunset too,

Singing to a chorus of people just like you.

But my happiness is followed,

Yes it always has been hollowed,

By the can't-quite-prophesy-it, wish-that-I-knew-why-it blues.

Shows up like a singer or an actor on cue,

I never can forget it,

It's hardly to my credit,

For I was born, my heart is torn—

Yes I say, born, born, born—

Blue, blue blue.

She played the final chord and sat back, clearly waiting, as clearly as if she'd cocked her head at me, which she was too proud to do.

What could I say to Pammy? It was still blue, but she'd lightened it by injecting a note of self-rebuke that made it seem as if the person singing was an oddball for being melancholy since the acceptable way to be was happy. I didn't like that suggestion, yet I didn't want to discourage her and I was also afraid to tell her and risk evaporating what I flattered myself was our friendship.

I didn't have to tell her.

“You hate it,” she said.

“Well, no,” I began, “I could never hate anything that came from you. It's just that this is kind of … ” I stammered. “Kind of, maybe, dry. I don't know.”

“Dry,” she said.

“As if there's something wrong with someone who doesn't think happy days are here again.”

“Dry,” she repeated. “Yes, I haven't got the new version right yet, it hasn't come together, and I have to make it fit with the old version that I'll be rerecording. I'll tickle it at home tonight. It needs some torch. Then I'll know how to sell it.”

By sell I knew she meant putting the song across when she sang it, not sell as in market. Though I reflected possibly they were the same thing.

She started scribbling changes on her score in a frenzy, but she looked up once and said, “Please don't go yet.”

The rhyme scheme of the stanzas, as she referred to them, was rather complex. Aa, bb, cc, dd, b, which contained an interior rhyme, followed by c, ee, ff, c. I suppose “Born Blue” has proved to be outside the canon of either blues or popular music, living a kind of autonomous life in the musical ether, somewhat like Porter's later “Begin the Beguine,” which blends classical and popular elements, or the earlier Berlin standard, “Alexander's Ragtime Band,” which has no ragtime in it whatsoever and is wonderful.

Many of the women who wrote hit songs in those days are no longer names we recognize, and the main reason we know Palmyra Millevoix is that she was also an actress. But we do still have some of the other women's songs, as we have Pammy's. “Fine and Dandy” by Kay Swift is still played, and so are “Willow Weep for Me” by Ann Ronnell and “Close Your Eyes” by Bernice Petkere. The female songwriter we know best from that era is Dorothy Fields, who was responsible, with her collaborator Jimmy McHugh, for “I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby,” “Exactly Like You,” and “I'm in the Mood for Love.” With her occasional collaborator Jerome Kern, Fields wrote “The Way You Look Tonight,” for which the pair won Academy Awards. With McHugh she wrote “Blue Again,” a fine song though it never pushed into the category of Pammy's “Born Blue.” When Palmyra Millevoix saw Dorothy Fields at a movie premiere, Fields told her she wished she'd written “Where's the Good in Goodbye,” to which my Pammy (
my
—what a laugh on me, but let it stand) replied she'd give anything except her daughter to have written “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” “How I'd like to leave my worries on the doorstep,” Pammy quoted as flashbulbs popped and she gave Dorothy a hug.