Girl of My Dreams (14 page)

In later decades I have endured the analyst's couch for tenures approaching those of Latin American dictators, but I've never been helped more than by Mrs. Daniels's hug and her few words. She didn't understand what I wrote. She only understood me.

I recalled watching my mother as she was inching away from us day by day. After her death my mother remained present to me in certain ways for some time. I could still hear her voice singing to me in her summer sounds even as these were growing dimmer.

After the one semester at Horace Mann, we were off west, to Minnesota first, then to Chicago where the Standard Varnish Works had its headquarters, and after that down to San Antonio, which was having a little building boom. Without forming friendships in my new schools, since we rarely stayed anywhere more than half a year, I got along well enough. My father, it was clear to me, had enough grief for both of us. I didn't want to show sorrow since his own was so evident in his change from garrulousness to silence. In a certain way a silent tyrant can be tougher to live with than a loud one because he seldom lets you know what he feels or wants. You know you can't produce what he wants. I was his last connection to her, I had come from her body; therefore, I should produce her as she had once produced me. But even then, ha, I was no producer.

Barnett Jant kept an upper lip so stiff I didn't see how he ever curled it around a morsel of food. Meals were taken without the exchange of a word. A tongue spends most of its life in the dark, and Barnett would let his out, rarely, to say not what he wanted but what he thought his son ought to want. This put me in a triple bind. I would think about what my father wanted, what my dead mother might have wanted, and finally, as a muted afterthought, what I myself might conceivably want. I blundered along through the fog of what I took to be others' judgments.

One evening before we left San Antonio, Barnett let it be known that it had popped into his head he should have been a doctor. “That way, I might have saved Syrilla. With your future before you, Owen, I wonder if you might consider becoming a physician yourself.” I wanted to laugh at being so thoroughly misunderstood. My father should have asked me to become a spiritual medium. It was too late for a doctor, but a medium might at least bring my mother's voice back to us. We could get up a séance. As for becoming a doctor, I hated the sight of blood, ran from needles, was repulsed by the very idea of surgery, and couldn't stand anything stronger than aspirin that came from the medical profession. Years went by.

Our journeys took us to North Dakota, down to Nevada, back east to New Hampshire, then out to Coeur d'Alene, where my father had been when my mother first became ill. We were visited by a fair-skinned woman who came to our door in a veil, which one might have seen in New York or Chicago at that time but was mystifyingly out of place in Idaho. Over her shoulders she wore a dark shawl and when she removed her accessories I saw she was quite pretty with dark eyes that took in everything. She and my father talked while I made dinner—by now I was in high school—and I heard him laugh with his whole throat for the first time since New York. I was glad. The woman laughed too, and I was less glad. After dinner my father said he would see Mrs. Roark home. Over the next few weeks my father went out several evenings, returning after I was asleep. When Mrs. Roark came over a second time there were only puzzled looks, no laughter.

We left Coeur d'Alene for Casper, Wyoming, where we stayed at a ranch for two semesters before moving on to Seattle. One night we named as many schools as we could that I'd been to and stopped counting at twenty-two. I was inhibited and dutiful in my classes but at home dreamed of adventures with presidents. Jackson and TR my standbys.

I went east for college and thought I'd stay there. Three years at Harvard, a transfer to Yale for the writing program with George Pierce Baker, who had left Harvard in a snit of some kind. Wishing me well, Baker cracked that since I now had a Harvard education and a Yale degree, my future was assured. I didn't dare ask my father for money for the year in Paris, so I kicked around New York. The Depression had hit by then and my father was less comfortable. “The paint I sell is as wet as ever,” he joked, “but the demand for it has dried up.” He moved to Chicago where he could ride out the Depression in a safe office job for Standard Varnish.

I couldn't get started on a play I hoped to write, but I pinched a few stray assignments for the
New York Post
and the
Herald Tribune
. I was eating peanut butter twice a day. My Jim Bicker period, with similar aims but without Poor Jim's rail-riding moxie. Two pieces for the
American Magazine
and
McCall's
, the first an assigned article on the Kentucky Derby, which I peopled with enough of the characters I met in Louisville during race week so that the social circus became far more compelling than the matter of which horse poked its nose across the wire first.
McCall's
published my short story about a New York party where everything went so disastrously, dramatically wrong that the host couple decided to divorce and went to bed in separate rooms.

These two pieces warranted a call from Jubilee. “One hundred and seventy-five a week for ten weeks,” Colonel DeLight hummed. “If things work out, young fella, you could become another Rupert Hughes or Yancey Ballard.” I'd never heard of either of them, though Yancey—Yeatsman himself—became my pal and mentor.

I arrived at the wrought-iron entrance to the studio in the dismal fall of 1932, thrilled to have a job. The double gates were intimidating with their look of impregnability, as was the molded starburst at the center of each along with the giant ornate lettering:
J U B I L E E
. Colonel DeLight was out sick so I showed myself around the lot. The stages loomed like large warehouses for precious cargo, and I didn't have the nerve to enter any of them. The backlot intrigued me with its fake trees and lawns, housefronts and storefronts, and streets of either concrete or imitation cobblestone. The New York street looked wrong, yet also right. The great city of stone where I'd been so awed as a boy, where my mother was born and died, was here pulverized to beaverboard and
papier-mâché.
There were New England, Chicago, and New Orleans streets as well. Rome and Jerusalem were façaded for, I supposed, a historical or Biblical epic.

Although it was a sunny day, staggeringly huge lights were mounted on the outdoor sets where shooting was under way both in a French village and the exterior of an Iowa farmhouse. I recognized no actors. Neither the action nor the lines I heard were as interesting as the sets themselves.

Back among the sound stages, I made my way toward the executive offices, two-story pink buildings in unremarkable Spanish stucco with red-tiled roofs. I'd heard of Amos Zangwill, of course, and knew he was the all-powerful studio head. Yet I was unprepared for the sight—tableau really—I suddenly encountered. An imperious figure emerged from the commissary, reminding me of a king or colonial officer as he strode through a throng of menials who fawned over him. He proceeded with a gray velvet cape thrown on his shoulders, looking down upon his attendants as they pressed around him. His hair swept back in a pompadour, he affected a showy ring that I half expected one of his servitors to kiss. Each was trying to get his attention with a query, a problem, a joke. Hollywood instantly disgusted me: the potentate of a studio with an entourage he clearly required to remind him every second how wise and omnipotent he was.

“You don't have to stare,” a friendly voice said to me. “He hardly needs any more of us gaping at him.” It was Colonel DeLight's secretary and typist for the writers, who introduced herself as Comfort O'Hollie. With a soft Irish accent, she apologized for her boss's absence and the fact no one had been available to give me a guided tour.

I told her I'd had a fine time on my own until I came upon the emperor.

“We make allowances,” she said. “This one may be riding for a fall though.”

I looked at her with alarm. How dare she even whisper that? How could a mere secretary speak that way about the mighty Zangwill? “Riding for a fall?” I said. “You sound like a revolutionary.” I laughed a little to let her know I was kidding.

“That's me grandmother, not me,” she said. “I'll tell you sometime about the infamous Grandmother O'Hollie. People are starting to resent this man, though. Funny thing, he used to be a regular party, always liked the writers. Then these suck-ups started to treat him the way they do, and he found out he likes it. He makes four times what anyone in his department gets.”

“His department? Isn't the whole studio his depar—”

“Sure, always eats lunch with the others who work for him, but he makes them draw straws to see who has to pay for him. Has the power of life and death over them.”

“Over everyone, I guess.” One of his retinue had just stooped to pick up the velvet cape that had fallen from the potentate's shoulders.

“Well, I mean in his department.”

“His department?” I asked again.

“Oh, I forgot you don't know anyone on the lot. That strutting gamecock is Hurd Dawn, head of scenery design and set construction.”

“Of course,” I said.

9

Perfict Horr of Jaabalee

FADE IN: PALMYRA MILLEVOIX
, a strikingly coiffed and expensively fashioned honey-blonde of twenty-six who displays certainty and a penchant for mockery, walks purposefully away from the massive carved oaken portal of a medieval pile, a pair of frolicking great danes mirrored in her sunglasses, her heels tapping across a brick courtyard to a German touring car, a Daimler, where she climbs into the uncovered front seat next to the
DRIVER
, who is dressed in maroon chauffeur's livery.

The castle's oaken door opens swiftly to disgorge the
BARON VON DAMM
, too young for his monocle but sporting the correct Heidelberg dueling scar on his right cheekbone, as he hurries uncomfortably to the touring car. His monocle, of course, falls from his eye and swings from its black cord as he rushes. He is used to summoning, not pursuing. With whatever dignity he can muster as an unaccustomed supplicant, he replaces his monocle and gestures for Palmyra to at least get into the black-roofed backseat, the proper way to ride with your driver. “Dis chust issn't done,” we cannot hear him say as he replaces his monocle, “und I ibsolutely cannot allow it,” he doesn't add as we don't listen to him because we're hearing instead Bach's Suite No. 43 for harpsichord, which will fade down so my own voice can be heard.

She never meant even to meet him, much less what followed, Pammy assured me later about the Baron von Damm. What always fascinated me was her bravura with men. In the Baron's case, she had met him on an Alpine hunting party where she'd been taken by a Rumanian munitions manufacturer known as the Bad Boy of the Balkans, who was said to have financed both sides in the two spirited middle European skirmishes that led to Sarajevo and the Archduke, another tale she spun.

Did I have a prurient interest in her exploits? Or rather, in her
telling
me her exploits? With her knee exposed, an impudent glint in her eye. In any case I was not bothered by her little
avventuras
as she called them, and as she strides decisively away from von Damm's castle—and from the Baron himself—she slightly resembles a child leaving a birthday party she has insufficiently enjoyed. Making herself comfortable beside the chauffeur, Palmyra inserts an ivory cigarette holder between her lips.

BARON VON DAMM

You must permit me, Palmyra, at least to accompany you to the station.

PALMYRA

(her cigarette is quickly lighted by the driver)

I wouldn't dream of making you late for polo, Schotzie.
Danke
for the steam engine.

BARON VON DAMM

But there iss no …

PALMYRA

Mach schnell, Herr Grebben
! Ta-ta, Baron.

As the Daimler promptly accelerates, do we simply see the monocle drop from the Baron's eye in consternation, or shall we have him scratch his slicked Plaster-of-Paris head, turn on his smartly clicked heel, and march back into his castle? And shall we, for the sake of contrast with drowsy Southern California, as it then was, see the Daimler speeding off the courtyard bricks, wheeling over the bridge that spans what had once been the Baron's forebears' moat, rounding the turn toward the quaint Bavarian village anciently fiefed by the von Damms, heading past orderly checkerboard farmland where the train sits at the station ready to speed our Palmyra toward the frontier? Perhaps we'll leave it with the monocle dropping and try for a smirk at the socially shackled German's expense. The Teutonic manner—always ripe for a chuckle or a shudder.

(To the producer: If the steam engine reference is too close to the train we know our heroine is about to take, what other outlandish thing can Pammy thank the Baron for that he never gave her? A stuffed bear—“I so admire taxidermy,” she can tell him—or a stuffed giraffe, even harder to come by; a linen press, jeweled kennel, crenelated parrot's cage, submarine, silver croquet mallet. Perhaps she always goodbyes her suitors with this kind of thank-you that leaves them puzzled and feeling inadequate: she's joking but they know they should have given her something they didn't quite come up with.)

Rumor jumped the Atlantic and sped across North America faster than Pammy could. By the time she arrived in Hollywood in 1930 with her three-year-old daughter Millicent, fresh from cabaret and stage triumphs in Berlin and Paris, the talk was that she had been involved with a ruthless Great War officer who had become a follower of the fascist madman. This was denied by all her producers and by Mossy himself after he coaxed her to Jubilee, but the talk persisted. Pammy said she never spoke of her personal life because she had an innocent to protect. When the madman actually came to power in 1933, it was thought for a time Pammy had better marry Trent Amberlyn just to stanch the rumor and provide a respectable father for Millie.