Girl of My Dreams (46 page)

Inquisitive energy hummed above the voices raised in greeting. Strangely, this was the one Party party I was ever asked about when the Fifties rolled around. The party's nominal purpose was to raise money for the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, nine young black Alabamans accused of raping two white women in a boxcar. All the meetings I went to, all the demonstrations, this is the only one they seemed to have a record of, and of course the FBI agents expected total recall of an event that occurred twenty years earlier. For once, thanks to my diary (which I never told them about), they were right. The FBI haunted all of us who were present for this occasion.

We were shown in by a kind of usher who looked disconcertingly like me—short hair, neatly combed, an earnest, unforgiving expression, eager both to please and to be superior. He was carefully dressed down in overalls and a work shirt. We moved past banners saying FREE THE BOYS and STAND FOR SOMETHING OR YOU'LL FALL FOR ANYTHING toward a silver hors d'ouvres tray featuring crudite and oysters. The tray was being passed formally by a butler—tall, dark and handsome—who wore black trousers, a white waistcoat, black bow tie and starched white shirt. “Working-class chic is apparently only for white people,” Sylvia murmured, her lips almost touching my ear.

“Darling Sylvia, thank God, at last a friendly face.” Our hostess, known on both coasts as the widow Flower, waved at Sylvia with her mother-of-pearl cigarette holder. For an instant as they hugged I was afraid the cigarette itself would light my improbable date's hair on fire. “My precious,” the widow Flower continued, “what an extraordinarily fresh young face you've contrived to bring with you.” The word
young
, I surmised, was as far as she'd go toward an accusation of cradle-robbery.

Sylvia introduced me to Gloriana Onslow Flower, an unrepentant snob out of her time and place. “Bertrand,” she called out to the tray-bearing butler, “make sure our dear friends have all the oysters in the sea.” Our hostess, Sylvia whispered, belonged not at a party promoting revolution but in pre-Revolutionary Paris vying with Marie Antoinette and Madame de Staël for the best salons and lovers.

She had begun, Sylvia went on, as Gloriana Onslow of the ancient but fallen Onslows of Massachusetts, related to Cabots, Lowells and Peabodys. At twenty-two she became an O'Brian, of the construction O'Brians, six or eight steps down socially but representing an enormous coup economically. This meant she had the wherewithal to live as an Onslow should but hadn't been able to do since the middle of the nineteenth century when alcohol, improvidence and rash marriages had drained the family substance.

It was said no nail was pounded between Hartford and Portland that was not hauled from Boston and hammered by an O'Brian carpenter. Eugene O'Brian was only Anglo-Irish, not fully leprechaun Irish, which meant that a few homes in Louisburg Square did not close their doors to Gloriana and her husband. Eugene knew he had married status if not frugality, and it pleased him to think his sons might one day be admitted to St. Paul's. Gloriana said she could tell when anyone pronounced O'Brian with an
e
instead of the
a
. If she spent money too frivolously Eugene became upset not over extravagance but waste. It was unseemly for his wife to own twenty-eight ball gowns. “Now dear,” she'd say, “time to give your silly Celtic thrift a rest.”

Gloriana admitted she was an unlikely candidate to have become, in what she called her frisky forties, a Communist. She liked to repeat, however, that she knew something about widows and orphans because ever since poor Eugene fell into a cement mixer while inspecting a construction site in Worcester she had had to fend for herself and her two sons. She didn't add that the thirty-two million dollars she inherited from poor Eugene, three generations removed from the Potato Famine that had sent the first O'Brian packing, made the fending tolerable.

“After two years,” Gloriana liked to recall, “I Flowered.” When it became likely that Prohibition would eventually be repealed, the owner of Flower Ales in Manchester, Bernard Flower, sailed to New York, where the widow O'Brian had sheltered her penury on Park Avenue, to position his English beer for conquest in the New World. The brewer picked up Gloriana at a performance of the Ziegfeld Follies where she had been dragged by a sister from Boston who wanted to do something wicked. Bernard Flower promptly forgot the first Mrs. Flower back in Manchester. Gloriana told of her initial tryst with Bernard following which, in deference to his nationality, she had said, “There now, feeling better, Mr. Flower?” Her remarriage ensued.

Even while it was still illegal his ale was unpopular, but Bernard Flower proved to have a knack for snapping up land bargains. Soon he owned a sturdy portion of western Long Island or, as he put it, a great deal of Great Neck. After providing Gloriana with a daughter on whom she doted, the ale and land baron was thrown from his polo pony, shattering his skull, during a match against a team of Argentinians. It was thus, at the end of the Twenties and her own thirties, that twice-widowed Gloriana found herself, as she put it, abruptly de-Flowered may the dear fellow rest in peace. With a dozen more millions from English ale and Long Island real estate, plus her two O'Brian teenage males and little female Flower child, the briefly grieving Gloriana betook herself and her brood in a private railroad car across the country in the depths of the Depression to settle in the West in 1932. Having a few contacts in Santa Barbara, she gave the Eastern enclave a try but wrote her sister that she found it conversationally arid and too much like Boston without the culture that is Boston's only excuse.

Eschewing Beverly Hills, Gloriana was a snob to the snobs and chose Santa Monica for its coastal access. She liked proximity to the motion picture industry, where she found social inspiration and concupiscent sodality. In her pantheon was only talent, but it had to be a particular talent she herself happened to appreciate. She disdained Dietrich, loved Ronald Colman, indulged Gable but wanted him to play only comedy, couldn't stand the likable Jimmy Stewart, loathed Garbo but approved of Crawford and Stanwyck. She pitied Jack Gilbert and thought it unfair that his squeaky voice killed him in talkies. In this private aristocracy she adored George Cukor, didn't warm to Frank Capra, loved David Selznick for his excesses, disapproved of Darryl Zanuck or at least didn't trust him. Where Mossy was concerned Gloriana was alternately petulant and tolerant; when she entered her Red period she told friends he was her favorite fascist because he was at heart a
farceur.
She knew Pammy only in passing, and she didn't think Pammy had the courage of what Gloriana referred to as her
soi-disant
politics. “Career, career, career,” she said. “Like all the stars, she doesn't want to come out of the trees and risk her salary, or in Palmyra's case the approval of her boss. Meow.”

In lovers, Gloriana favored writers for their tormented souls, though she found young actors irresistible. Her first Hollywood conquest of consequence was Gary Cooper, who had just made the earliest film version of
A Farewell to Arms
. She thought him elegant, handsome beyond description and, unlike his screen persona, articulate. Her complaint was simple: “This man,” she confided to Sylvia, “has the most divine
équipage
I should hope to find in California but absolutely no
derrière
with which to push it.”

Gloriana snapped up Poor Jim Bicker, wallowing with him in his misery, as ravenous for his rages against society as for his animal passion. The day soon came, however, when Poor Jim had the misjudgment to introduce Gloriana to an unkempt Communist professor out from CCNY, a man whose cheekbones and goatee—his only neatly groomed feature—were Lenin's while his piercing eyes and tousled hair belonged to Trotsky, enabling him to look like both Revolutionary heroes at the same time. Gloriana swallowed him whole and joined the Party. Her sons, of course, hated Professor Bruno Leonard, but he took care to charm Gloriana's daughter with sweets and Winnie-the-Pooh books. The professor was the guest of honor at Gloriana's soiree and was caroming around the room from cluster to cluster.

Before Gloriana pushed off from Sylvia and me she advertised that Professor Leonard would be addressing the assemblage as the climax of the evening. Sylvia said, “They harangue us, it's true, but honey, we live in such a goldfish bowl out here, so remote from the real ocean with real fish in it, that we can stand a little haranguing.”

There it was again. Honey.

“Mossy had his turn around the floor with Gloriana, you know,” Sylvia said.

“No I didn't,” I said, adding blindly, “she's older than he is, isn't she?” Immediately I wished I could bite my tongue off. “Not that it matters,” I stammered.

Sylvia was forgiving. “That's right, Owen. Not that it matters.”

Poor Jim Bicker walked by. “You smell them?” he asked.

“What are you talking about?” Sylvia asked back.

“The perfumes of the rich women all swimming together while they do their incantations about the poor. I may be sick.”

He walked away. Sylvia shrugged. “I like Jim well enough,” she said, “and he's a tough writer, but really no one put a gun to his head to come here.”

As Gloriana sailed around her party, Sylvia added a postscript to her story about our hostess. “When Gloriana did her little two-step with Mossy,” Sylvia said, “he had his man Obie Joyful fix her the most gorgeous stunning bouquet. His message was, ‘To My Wild Flower, From the Moss you have gathered so wickedly—and winningly.' On and on it went, he had Tutor Beedleman write it for him and I helped Tutor.”

A Jubilee executive named Abner Prettyman came by, quietly letting Sylvia know he was there. Although Prettyman was one of Mossy's bailiffs, I'd never met him. “Time to rally the masses against the classes,” he said. “And which are you, Abner?” Sylvia asked. “I'm with the people, always have been,” he said over his shoulder as he moved on. “
Which
people?” I mumbled. “Exactly,” said Sylvia, “he's obviously spying.”

I drifted to the canapé table as Sylvia spoke to a short older woman with a diamond necklace and an upswept pompadour that made her taller but ludicrous. Threading my way through strangers, I was blockaded by two unbudgeable women who apparently had the same name. “The problem, Roxanne,” said the first, shortwaisted and buxom, “is that the working class wants raises more than changes, and the middle class craves its privileges more than it dares the risk of revolution.”

“That, Roxanne,” said the second, slender and bony, “is precisely why we have to radicalize the workers.”

“The out-of-workers, Roxanne, because everyone's unemployed now.”

“The meek will inherit the earth all right, but only if we fight for them.”

“Still, what if they don't want the kind of earth we deliver them?”

“We educate them to like it, Roxanne. That's what study groups are for—getting the working class to see itself
as
a class.”

“Which leaves us where with the middle … I mean bourgeoisie?”

The second Roxanne tittered. “Like Comrade Stalin, Roxanne, we may have to crack a few heads to make our omelet.”

Electing not to tell them they meant eggs not heads because I figured they really did mean heads, I slithered around the Roxannes and darted for the canapés. I collided clumsily with a squat red-haired woman I'd seen somewhere. “I know you,” she interrupted my apology. “You're Eleanor's kid, Davey, aren't you?”

I explained I didn't even know any Eleanor. I was offended to be called a kid by someone who couldn't have been more than a couple of years older than I was, but she was filled with both wrath and a worldweariness that gave her the demeanor of age. She identified herself as Katinka the Red. With her hot-coal eyes, ruddy complexion, arms bared as if for combat, shoulders coming at me, Katinka was like a whole squadron. I felt surrounded. “Okay,” I said, “I've seen you at Jubilee.”

“Not any more,” she said in a rasp, proceeding with one of those cocktail party—in this case Party—tales that unpopular guests subject their cornered prey to. “I began as a moony little Wobbly,” she said, “a naïve Iowa farmgirl with thoughts of reform. I passed into my Bolshie phase early in the Depression, and I can see nothing ahead now, no cure, but total revolution, where I hope to be a foot soldier.”

While I swallowed that along with a smoked scallop, pugnacious Katinka the Red, oozing hatred, gave a rueful laugh. Wolfing down snacks herself, she said Stalin was too gentle with the kulaks. “Just exterminate them, hee hee,” was how she put it. As a little contest with myself, I tried to tease out something nondoctrinaire, but she held to her belligerence as if it were a life preserver. If I said the market may go down again, she snickered not for the big boys it won't. If I said at least Mossy wants a picture with some realism in it, she snorted that his merchandised realism was only a matter of form, hardly the content most Americans live with. If I said the whole society seems upside down, heh heh, even the Yankees can't win a World Series these days, she sniffed that it was only musical chairs and the fat wallets in St. Louis or Detroit or Chicago were having a turn with their own crib toys. Everything to Katinka was economics, conspiracy and ruthlessness as she fused Marx with Darwin and wound up irate at what she called the way of the world, a world she couldn't wait to destroy even as she inhaled its canapés. “When they get tired of the Depression,” she said, “the bankers will start the World War all over again, same teams, different players, there's profit in death, don't you see that, Owen, hee hee hee hee.”

Katinka's mirthless laugh curdled in my ears but reminded me where I'd seen her. She was the woman I'd given Pammy's Plymouth to at the Communist office in Venice, talkative now, lubricated by her surroundings and drink. Almost at the same moment she remembered who I was. “Oh sure, you're the guy who runs errands for the great Palmyra Millevoix. I drove you to Jubilee after you delivered her car.”