Myra Breckinridge (2 page)

BUCK LONER REPORTS

Recording Disc No. 708

10 January

Other matters to be taken up by board in reference to purchases for new closed cir cuit TV period paragraph I sort of remember that Gertrudes boy was married some years ago and I recall being surprised as he was a fag or so I always thought with that sister of mine for a mother how could he not be only thing is I never knew the little bastard except one meeting in St Louis oh maybe twenty years ago when she was there with her third husband the certified public accountant and I re member vaguely this sissy kid who wanted to go to the movies all the time who I gave an autographed picture of me on Sporko that palomino horse that was and is the trademark of Buck Loner even though the original palomino in question has been for a long time up there in the happy hunting ground and my ass is now too big to inflict on any other nag except maybe Myra Breckinridge period paragraph what is the true Myra Breckinridge story that is the big question you could have knocked me over with a feather when she came sashaying into the office with her skirt hiked up damn near to her chin at least when she sits down she is a good look ing broad but hoteyed definitely hoteyed and pos sibly mentally unbalanced I must keep an eye on her in that department but the tits are keen and probably hers and I expect she is just hungering for the old Buck Loner Special parenthesis start taking pee-pills again to lose weight zipper keeps slipping down which makes a damned sloppy impression end parenthesis period paragraph but what I dont like one bit is the matter of the will and I guess I better put Flagler and Flagler onto it first thing tomorrow it is true that the property was left me and Gertrude jointly but she always said Ted she said she never called me Buck she was the most envious broad that ever lived especially when I was right up there big gest star of them all after Roy bigger than Gene cer tainly but wish I had Genes eye for real estate that man is loaded of course I dont do so bad with the Academy but Gene Autry today is capital r capital i capital c capital h rich well 1 was better box office Ted Gertrude said you can keep my share of that lousy orange grove that our father threw away his life savings to buy just as the bottom dropped out of citrus fruit I never want to see or hear of it again is what she said more or less but naturally when word come to Saint Louis and later to the Island of Manhattan where she was living with that crazy plc ture painter that Hollywood was spilling over into nearby Brentwood and Westwood and all the other woods were filling up with lovers of the sun and fun from all parts of the U S A Gertrude did ask once or twice about our mutual holding but when I told her I needed money to start the Academy and needed the orange grove to teach in and maybe put a building on she was very reasonable merely saying that when the time came I was to help Myron to become a movie star as he was even better looking than I was at his age and besides could act the little fag she sent me all sorts of pictures of him and he was pretty as a picture in a drippy sort of way and wrote these far out pieces about the movies that I could never get through in magazines I never heard of in England and even in French some of them were written I will say he sent them all to me including a long article type piece that I did read about so help me god the rear ends of all the major cowboy stars from austere aspiring Gothic flat ass Hoot Gibson to impertinent baroque ass James Garner shit ex clamation mark paragraph Flagler and Flagler will be notified first thing tomorrow morning and told to examine with a fine tooth comb the deeds to this property and also to make a careful investigation of one Myra Breckinridge widow and claimant and try to find some loophole as I have no intention at all of letting her horn in on a property that I my self increased in value from a five thousand dollar orange grove to what is now at a conservative esti mate worth in the neighborhood counting buildings of course of two million dollars maybe I should lay Myra that might keep her happy for a while while we discuss the ins and outs of our business mean while I better see if that fag nephew of mine left a proper will all this will have to be gone into in care ful detail by Flagler and Flagler and their private detective meanwhile she will be working here where I can keep an eye on her period paragraph check new TV makeup equipment write President Johnson giving him my views on subsidy for the arts in line with talk I gave to Fresno Rotary before Xmas those two kids are definitely balling and I don't like that sort of thing to be too visible on the campus par ticularly since she lives here in the dormitory and the matron tells me she is off with that stud every chance she can get and is always coming' in after midnight a beautiful little piece she is and it may well be that the Buck Loner Special could straighten her out but I must proceed cautiously like they say as she is a minor of eighteen and naturally drawn to a male minor of nineteen six feet two and built like a stone wall who wants to be a movie star with sideburns a nice kid if he stays out of jail and I hope one day he makes it but meanwhile its his making her that I mind I mean what would her mother say her worst fears about Hollywood fulfilled I better tell the matron to give her a tough talking to or back she goes to Winnipeg as an enemy alien and deflow ered virgin through no fault of yours truly remem ber to tell masseuse to come at five instead of six am getting horny as hell thinking about the dear little thing from Winnipeg whats her name Sally Sue Baby Dee Mary Ann thats it Mary Ann Pringle and shes making it with Rusty Godowsky from De troit where else a nice dumb polack who maybe has that extra something that makes for stardom that masseuse better be good today 7 I write this sitting at my desk in the office to which I have been assigned in the west wing of the main building of what must be an incredibly valuable piece of real estate. I've spent the last few days prowling about the Academy and it's a most expensive creation, worth millions I should say, and half of it's mine, or at least half the ground it stands on. I have already contacted a good lawyer and presently he will surprise Buck Loner with my claims. Our case, I am assured, is airtight. I find Buck Loner something of an enigma. No man can be as cheerful as be seems to be, as desirous of creating love as he says he is. Yet it is true that oceans of warmth flow from him to all the students, quite indiscriminately, and they seem to adore him, even those who are known as "hippies" and mock everyone (the argot is curiously rich out here, and slightly repellent: teenagers--already a ghastly word--are known as "teenyhoppers"!). Reluctantly, I find myself admiring the man, monster though he is. But then I shall soon break him to my will. Is there a man alive who is a match for Myra Breckinridge?

8

I sit now in a bus on my way to Culver City--and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer! My heart is beating so quickly that I can hardly bear to look out the window for fear that suddenly against that leaden horizon marked by oil derricks, I shall behold--like some fantastic palace of dreams--the Irving Thalberg Memorial Building and its attendant sound stages whose blank (but oh so evocative!) fa�es I have studied in photographs for twenty years. Not wanting to spoil my first impression, I keep my eye on this notebook which I balance on one knee as I put down at random whatever comes into my mind, simply anything in order to save for myself the supreme moment of ecstasy when the Studio of Studios, the sublime motor to this century's myths, appears before me as it has so many times in dreams, its great doors swinging wide to welcome Myra Breckinridge to her rightful kingdom. I was born to be a star, and look like one today: a false hairpiece gives body to my hair while the light Max Factor base favored by Merle Oberon among other screen lovelies makes luminous my face even in the harsh light of a sound stage where I shall soon be standing watching a take. Then when the director says, "O.K., print it," and the grips prepare for another setup, the director will notice me and ask my name and then take me into the commissary and there, over a Green Goddess salad (a favorite of the stars), talk to me at length about my face, wondering whether or not it is photogenic until I stop him with a smile and say: "There is only one way to find out. A screen test." To be a film star is my dearest daydream. After all, I have had some practical experience in New York. Myron and I both appeared in a number of underground movies. Of course they were experimental films and like most experiments, in the laboratory and out, they failed but even had they succeeded they could never have been truly Hollywood, truly mythic. Nevertheless, they gave me a sense of what it must be like to be a star. This trip is endless. I hate buses. I must rent or buy a car. The distances are unbelievable out here and to hire a taxi costs a fortune. This particular section of town is definitely ratty-looking with dingy bungalows and smogfilled air; my eyes burn and water. Fortunately elaborate neon signs and an occasional eccentrically shaped building make magic of the usual. We are now passing a diner in the shape of an enormous brown doughnut. I feel better already. Fantasy has that effect on me. What to make of the students? I have now taught four classes in Posture (how to walk gracefully and sit down without knocking over furniture) and two in Empathy (I invite them to pretend they are oranges, drinks of water, clouds... the results are unusual, to say the least). Though I have nothing to do with the Speech Department, I could not help but notice what difficulty most of the students have in talking. The boys tend to bark while the girls whine through their noses. Traditional human speech seems to have passed them by, but then one must never forget that they are the first creations of that television culture which began in the early Fifties. Their formative years were spent watching pale gray figures (no blacks, no whites--significant detail) move upon a twenty-one-inch screen. As a result, they are bland and inattentive, responsive only to the bold rhythms of commercials. Few can read anything more complex than a tabloid newspaper. As for writing, it is enough that they can write their name, or "autograph" as they are encouraged to call it, anticipating stardom. Nevertheless, a few have a touch of literary genius (that never dies out entirely), witness the obscene graffiti on the men's bathroom wall into which I strayed by accident the first day and saw, in large letters over one of the urinals, "Buck Sucks." Can this be true? I would put nothing past a man who traffics so promiscuously in love, not knowing that it is hate alone which inspires us to action and makes for civilization. Look at Juvenal, Pope, Billy Wilder. In the Posture class I was particularly struck by one of the students, a boy with a Polish name. He is tall with a great deal of sand-colored curly hair and sideburns; he has pale blue eyes with long black lashes and a curving mouth on the order of the late Richard Cromwell, so satisfyingly tortured in Lives of a Bengal Lancer. From a certain unevenly rounded thickness at the crotch of his blue jeans, it is safe to assume that he is marvelously hung. Unfortunately he is hot for an extremely pretty girl with long straight blonde hair (dyed), beautiful legs and breasts, reminiscent of Lupe Velez. She is mentally retarded. When I asked her to rise she did not recognize the word "rise" and so I had to ask her "to get up" which she did understand. He is probably just as stupid but fortunately has the good sense not to talk too much. When he does, however, he puts on a hillbilly accent that is so authentic that I almost melt in my drawers. "I thank we gawn git on mahty fahn, Miz Myra" were his first words to me after class as he looked down into my upturned face, confident of his masculine primacy. He was, in fact, so close to me that I could smell the most appetizing odor of deodorant mingled with tobacco and warm boy. But before I could make a suitable answer, she pulled him away. Poor child! She doesn't know that I shall have him in the end while...

9

I can hardly bear it another moment! I am reborn or in the process of rebirth like Robert Montgomery in Here Comes Mr. Jordan. I am seated in front of a French caf�n a Montmartre street on the back lot at Metro. Last year's fire destroyed many of the studio's permanent outdoor sets-those streets and castles I knew so much better than ever I knew the Chelsea area of Manhattan where Myron and I used to exist. I deeply regret the fire, mourn all that was lost, particularly the famous New York City street of brownstones and the charming village in Normandy. But, thank Heaven, this caf�till stands. Over a metal framework, cheap wood has been so arranged and painted as to suggest with astonishing accuracy a Paris bistro, complete with signs for BYRRH, while a striped awning shades metal tables and chairs set out on the "sidewalk." Any minute now, I expect to see Parisians. I would certainly like to see a waiter and order a Pernod. I can hardly believe that I am sitting at the same table where Leslie Caron once awaited Gene Kelly so many years ago, and I can almost re-create for myself the lights, the camera, the sound boom, the technicians, all converged upon this one table where, in a blaze of artificial sunlight, Leslie much too thin but a lovely face with eyes like mine--sits and waits for her screen lover while a man from makeup delicately dusts those famous features with powder. From the angle where I sit I can see part of the street in Carvel where Andy Hardy lived. The street is beautifully kept up as the shrine it is, a last memorial to all that was touching and--yes--good in the American past, an era whose end was marked by two mushroom shapes set like terminal punctuation marks against the Asian sky. A few minutes ago I saw Judge Hardy's house with its neatly tended green lawn and windows covered with muslin behind which there is nothing at all. It is quite eerie the way in which the houses look entirely real from every angle on the slightly curving street with its tall green trees and flowering bushes. Yet when one walks around to the back of the houses, one sees the rusted metal framework, the unpainted wood which has begun to rot, the dirty glass of the windows and the muslin curtains soiled and torn. Time withers all things human; although yesterday evening when I saw Ann Rutherford, stopped in her car at a red light, I recognized immediately the great black eyes and the mobile face. She at least endures gallantly, and I could not have been more thrilled! Must find where Lewis Stone is buried. This is the happiest moment of my life, sitting here alone on the back lot with no one in sight, for I was able to escape the studio guide by telling him that I wanted to lie down in an empty office of the Thalberg Building; then of course I flew straight here to the back lot which is separated from the main studio by a public road. If only Myron could have seen this! Of course he would have been saddened by the signs of decay. The spirit of what used to be has fled. Most dreadful of all, NO FILM is currently being made on the lot; and that means that the twenty-seven huge sound stages which saw the creation of so many miracles: Gable, Garbo, Hepburn (Katharine), Powell, Loy, Garland, Tracy and James Craig are now empty except for a few crews making television commercials. Yet I must write the absolute truth for I am not Myron Breckinridge but myself and despite the intensely symbiotic relationship my husband and I enjoyed during his brief life and despite the fact that I do entirely support his thesis that the films of 1935 to 1945 inclusive were the high point of Western culture, completing what began that day in the theatre of Dionysos when Aeschylus first spoke to the Athenians, I must confess that I part company with ]\Eyron on the subject of TV. Even before Marshall McLuhan, I was drawn to the gray shadows of the cathode tube. In fact, I was sufficiently avant-garde m 1959 to recognize the fact that it was no longer the movies but the television commercial that engaged the passionate attention of the world's best artists and technicians And now the result of their extraordinary artistry is this new world, like it or not, we are living in: post-Gutenberg and pre-Apocalypse. For almost twenty years the minds of our children have been filled with dreams that will stay with them forever, the way those maddening jingles do (as I write, I have begun softly to whistle "Rinso White," a theme far more meaningful culturally than all of Stravinsky or even John Cage). I submitted a piece on this subject to the Partisan Review in the summer of 1960. I believe, without false modesty, that I proved conclusively that the relationship between consumer and advertiser is the last demonstration of necessary love in the 'West, and its principal form of expression is the television commercial. I never heard from PR but I kept a carbon of the piece and will incorporate it into the book on Parker Tyler, perhaps as an appendix. For almost an hour I watched a television commercial being made on the same stage where Bette Davis acted in The Catered Affair--that predictably unhappy result of the movies attempting to take over the television drama when what they should have taken over was the spirit of the commercials. Then I was given lunch in the commissary which is much changed since the great days when people in extraordinary costumes wandered about, creating the impression that one was inside a time machine gone berserk. Now television executives and technicians occupy all the tables and order what used to be Louis B. Mayer Chicken Soup only the name of Mayer has been, my guide told me, stricken from the menu. So much for greatness! Even more poignant as reminders of human transiency are the empty offices on the second floor of the Thalberg Building. I was particularly upset to see that the adjoining suites of Pandro S. Berman and the late Sam Zimbalist were both vacant. Zimbalist (immortal because of Boom Town) died in Rome while producing Ben Hur which saved the studio's bacon, and Pandro S. Berman (Dragon Seed, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Seventh Cross) has gone into what the local trade papers refer to as "indie production." How tragic! MGM without Pandro S. Berman is like the American flag without its stars. No doubt about it, an era has indeed ended and I am its chronicler. Farewell the classic films, hail the television commercial! Yet nothing human that is great can entirely end. It is merely transmuted--in the way that the wharf where Jeanette MacDonald arrived in New Orleans (Naughty Marietta, 1935) has been used over and over again for a hundred other films even though it will always remain, to those who have a sense of history, Jeanette's wharf. Speaking of history, there was something curiously godlike about Nelson Eddy's recent death before a nightclub audience at Miami. In the middle of a song, he suddenly forgot the words. And so, in that plangent baritone which long ago earned him a permanent place in the pantheon of superstars, he turned to his accompanist and said, "Play 'Dardanella,' and maybe I'll remember the words." Then he collapsed and died. Play "Dardanella"! Play on! In any case, one must be thankful for those strips of celluloid which still endure to remind us that once there were gods and goddesses in our midst and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (where I now sit) preserved their shadows for all time! Could the actual Christ have possessed a fraction of the radiance and the mystery of H. B. Warner in the first King of Kings or revealed, even on the cross, so much as a shadow of the moonstruck Nemi-agony of Jeffrey Hunter in the second King of Kings, that astonishing creation of Nicholas Ray?