Girl of My Dreams (15 page)

“The Nazi business will ruin your career,” Mossy predicted, pushing a wedding. “Even just the allegation of it. The kikes here will kill you, and if the kikes don't get you Hearst will. People are calling you a better singer and comedienne than Marion Davies, and the old man hates that. Then there's the FBI recording of your dirty song.”

“Fun,” Pammy said, remembering the night she brought Oceanhouse down.

“What will you do?” I asked her when I found an excuse to be in her bungalow by bringing her a tiara I'd lifted from the costume department, mistakenly thinking she might like to wear it to a premiere she was going to.

“Trent's willing,” she said, “but I'll be damned if I'll let gossip rule Millie's and my life to the extent of making a false marriage, moving into a false honeymoon cottage with Trent Amberlyn, and then having a false separation a few months later so we can move back to the home we love.” She needn't have worried. By the spring of 1934 the ruckus over Pammy and von Damm had receded to a whisper.

As to Millie's paternity, it would remain the same kind of mystery as Pammy's own background. Baron von Damm himself? The Bad Boy of the Balkans? Was Millie's father a Frenchman named Serge, or was Serge Millevoix, who had directed Sarah Bernhardt in a number of plays, Pammy's own father? This seemed plausible and was used by several studios' publicity departments, who variously cast an American heiress, a salesgirl from Kalamazoo, an English duchess, or Bernhardt herself as Pammy's mother. Pammy could be both upper and lower class, portray irony as well as sincerity, be sexy and brainy at the same time, a little like Margaret Sullavan, with eyes that spoke sonnets and with a kinder nature than Joan Crawford. Unlike what happened with Garbo, fame was not a car crash leaving her scarred and in retreat; fame seemed only Pammy's due.

Her look was the herald of unknown treasures. In movies Pammy yielded the first kiss as one would a pawn at chess. She darted a glance at a man that said come hither but watch your step, buddy. Luminosity in the translucent flesh. The radiant heat arising from her neck and shoulders, promising everything, granting little.

The camera saw the heat, the glow, and audiences saw what the camera saw.

The account of Pammy's origins I liked best, told by her friend Teresa Blackburn, concerns a Scottish furrier, Angus Jamieson, who takes his family to Genoa shortly after the turn of the century. He has been unable to perform coitus following the birth of his fourth child. “A Scotsman,” Teresa scoffed, “who can't throw the high hard one to Patricia MacBannock, his bride of twelve years.” It is hoped sunny Italy will improve everyone's dour disposition. It does. Angus and Patricia leave the children with a basic nose-touching-chin crone and light out by train and carriage for the Italian countryside.

The couple reach Padua where, as Angus later puts it, after a hiatus of months they enjoy one another carnally. But that's not enough for the Scotsman. A day later, touring a church called the Capella degli Scrovegni, he spies a schoolgirl with a complexion that would bring drool to the chin of Botticelli. He gives an excuse to Patricia over lunch—he must walk and think by himself—and circles back to the school attached to the Capella where he finds the girl, who is having a singing lesson. Angus waits patiently, further entranced by this voice of an angel, and then asks the girl in his halting Italian if he can meet her father. Whatever for? she wants to know. He says because, Signorina, you are so beautiful. Then surely you wish to meet me and not my father, saith the maiden who, within the hour, is maiden no more.

The furrier hauls the girl back to Edinburgh as nanny to his children. His wife is now pregnant again and can use the help. Despite the Capella, despite the cross she wears, it soon develops young Larissa is a Northern Italian Jewess, or at least partly so, because her family back in Padua goes crazy over the breach and reads the ceremony of the dead for their lost daughter, as her sister reports in a letter to Edinburgh. Not long after this Larissa herself proves to be with child. Fearful of scandal, Angus arranges for her to leave his family's service and go to the Azores with a sea captain of his acquaintance. Larissa meets the Millevoix family there and falls into basically the same pattern as in Scotland. But Madame Millevoix, who had her own
fin de siècle
adventures, accepts with relief the situation that Patricia MacBannock would have killed Angus Jamieson for. A daughter is born, and Larissa and Serge Millevoix abscond for a time to French Equatorial Africa, where another daughter is born. The following year, all the Millevoixes are reunited in the Loire Valley in France, where, until she is packed off to the convent in Ghent to be instructed by nuns, Palmyra grows up, never certain whether her parentage is originally Millevoix or Jamieson, for Mme. Millevoix goes on having children and Palmyra is one of a spirited brood. Larissa herself eventually leaves for the chorus of the Paris Opéra and takes no child with her.

I've told how I was invaded by Poor Jim Bicker on the Sunday morning after Mossy's party. I then loopily wrote Pammy the absurd fan letter that I tried to deliver, failed, and tore to pieces. Consoling myself with lunch, I was mulling Bicker's hard-times dirge and my miscalculated letter when my phone rang. I ignored it as I slurped my salutary chicken soup, but the ringing persisted. I grabbed the receiver to hear the bark of Dunster Clapp from Jubilee, the Zangwill henchman who had contributed to Joey Jouet's death. He could fire you, as he did Joey, or he could ladle out praise from his master. In this case neither: I was to pick up a script and deliver it to Pammy. Apparently Clapp hadn't been informed of the triumphant reception of my
Doll's House
treatment. He rattled off directions to the Millevoix weekend home as if I were still a peon.

Obligingly, I drove with the script fifty or so miles east to Red Woods, as Pammy called her country retreat above Upland in the foothills of Mount Baldy. Red Woods was not only her haven but was also far enough from Beverly Hills so that she was normally unbothered on weekends by the likes of me. On the radio Pammy was singing “I never have found where's the good in goodbye.” I turned it off, a reminder of Mossy's party.

I was approaching Pammy's home essentially an attendant squire. Yes, I was a writer, took myself for one, but I was also twenty-four and had in three years exactly one and one half screen credits on two movies, forgotten as soon as they were released,
The Vamp of Louisville
and
Lost Archipelago
. I'd been the first writer on no movie, and all the scripts I'd worked on had been re-assigned to other writers after me. Dunster Clapp or Seaton Hackley or Colonel DeLight, anyone in a supervisory capacity at Jubilee, could tell me to do anything and I'd do it to keep the $275 a week—a hundred a week more than when I began—flowing.
A Doll's House
would be my breakthrough, if the deconstruction of a masterpiece into a feel-good ninety minutes could be said to constitute a breakthrough. Still, I raked my work up through bloody visions as much as Ibsen did, or Brecht for that matter, soon to arrive in Hollywood himself. Feeling always an outsider, as much as any of them I plied the exile's vain trade: expectant, desperate.

Pammy was with two friends baking on the flagstones by her pool. I wanted them to notice me, I wanted them to ignore me. The three women were so obviously enjoying themselves I felt worse than an intruder, more like a burglar of their space.

“So that left only the sister in the Alfa Romeo,” one of them was saying.

“Can't believe it, honey,” said one of the others. “Ah'm given to mistakes mahsef, as y'all know bitter'n innybuddy in this town, but I nevah even dreamed about doin' that.”

“She never told any of that to me,” said Pammy, the third sunbather. “So I guess we know who she trusts.”

“And who she dudn't trust fuhther'n she kin th'ow a nekkid rhino.”

Three kinds of laughter from three sylphs—throaty, giggly, almost a cackle.

Identifiable from a distance only by their manes, the three were honey-blonde, auburn, and blonder-than-blonde, more platinum than Harlow. “Race, isn't it?” I said as I approached under the canopy of wisteria vines that led to the pool, which was partially shaded by a giant cork oak. “Excuse me for the interruption, Pammy, but Dunster Clapp urgently wanted you to see a script before you go in tomorrow. Pardon me, Teresa, I'll only be a minute.” If I'd thought my use of the familiar Race would somehow self-welcome me into their company, my apologetic stance immediately afterward effectively confirmed me as Messenger, Errand Boy, Stooge.

Actresses in those days were seen as sleeping beauties awakened from anonymity by the shrewdness of a male producer or director who would see their promise and mold it, bring them in from the chill of poverty that grew them. On the road from obscurity to celebrity they'd have a number of benefactors, some of whom, yes, they'd sleep with, all of whom brought them along. Essentially, they were dependent colonies of an imperial power that gradually prepared them for a degree of autonomy.

The so-called discovery of auburn-haired Teresa Blackburn did not feature her sipping a Coke in a drugstore but knocking, fairly beating, on the door of any assistant casting director who would listen to her sing, watch her dance, or sit still as she read a scene from Maxwell Anderson or Shaw. It turned out she couldn't sing a lick, but she could tear off a line of dialogue and spit it back so it rent the air. Pammy prized Teresa for having clawed her way to a level not far below where Pammy had arrived almost by accident—the European exception that proved the American rule—and she admired Teresa's Scottish class rage at people who came by their luck easily including Pammy herself. Teresa and her ballplaying brother Stubby were both outcomes of liquid evenings between feckless parents who couldn't, in the phrase of the day, rub two nickels together, and who stayed with each other only long enough to breed. In a sense Pammy and Teresa educated each other, Pammy inducting Teresa into sophistication, Teresa showing Pammy what life was like in the promised land for those who had little promise.

The third actress around the pool—described in story conferences as the slutty flirt—was Rachel Honeycut, whom I knew from her having gone around with an actor pal of mine as he was making a name for himself in gangster pictures. In any gathering of women Race, as she was called, would be the first one to be noticed. Women as well as men would gape at her almost-white hair, her breathy Hello, her mouth in a perpetual kissing contour somewhere between a pout and a pucker.

Race was from declined gentility whose principle toil was to stay on the right side of the law in Greenville, Mississippi. In her late teens she'd fled west toward anything destiny would put in her path, which was generally hard-luck men with schemes they didn't believe themselves but could sell to a Deep Southern naïf. She bounced around town for a year until she actually was discovered in a drugstore, though it was at the prescription counter. A silents producer, pushed to the sidelines less by the advent of talkies than his involvement in a horse doping scandal, had been Race's first significant Hollywood boyfriend. She was trying to buy cheap sleeping pills and he was angling for more elegant barbiturates when they no sooner met than shared chemicals. He introduced her to a cameraman and that was all it took since no one could see Race without wanting to photograph her. She had a successful test before the week was out, and in 1933 signed with Jubilee to play a party girl in a New Orleans saloon.

While her spirit soared—she had two photographs above her bed in her little Hollywood apartment, Andrew Jackson and Marie Curie, the southern populist and the female scientist—her flesh had another agenda. Race was soon sniffing, swallowing, and injecting her boyfriend's pharmacopoeia, and the boyfriend was shortly after that hitting her for real and imagined offenses against what might generously be termed their relationship. Making a picture with Race at Jubilee, Pammy and Teresa rescued her, but a pattern was established.

They had warned Race not even to have dinner with the songwriter Cyrus Henscher, who was scoring her current picture. Henscher's penchant was to charm and then brutalize women. Race went along to dinner with him anyway after he waddled up to her one day and told her he couldn't get her out of his mind. He waddled not because he was obese—he was only paunchy—but because his feet splayed out like a duck's. Race justified the date by saying she could help the songsmith reform, exactly what Cy Henscher had no interest in doing. A squat middleweight, Henscher caromed from one studio to another writing songs and mistreating women.

Henscher sang Race a tune over dessert, ending with, “I promise you my banger/ Reposes in its hangar/ Until summoned by the loveliest of humans;/ I'm just a lonely lover/ As I hope you will discover/ Though I wish I were a song by Vincent Youmans.”

Race yielded. Henscher was sweet to her, even sexually considerate, the first evening. Naturally, Race saw him again. This time he took her to a hotel in downtown Los Angeles. It would be more romantic, he told her. When they were upstairs in their room, Henscher produced from his suitcase a three-foot length of hose. Before Race could react the brute had bolted the door. In the taxi she took to Pammy's home afterward, Race had to balance on her knees since she could neither sit down nor lean against the seat. As Pammy applied cold cream to her body, Race told her Henscher had warbled a macabre ditty about welts and bruises as he lashed her, then chortled.

“Son of a bitch won't get away with this,” Pammy vowed. But she knew the police were thoroughly uninterested in domestic affairs where there were no witnesses, and Henscher was soon off to Paramount, out of whatever reach Pammy had at Jubilee. Of course, I didn't know any of this then.

The women by the pool were not exactly pining for a male presence that Sunday. Men don't get it, especially well behaved young men as I was, men whose presence normally elicits a smile, that women do not necessarily require our company. It had been only a few weeks since the Henscher assault, of which I remained cheerfully ignorant. As I stood trying not to gape at Pammy's and Teresa's skimpy two-piece bathing suits that had reached Hollywood from the south of France, wondering why Race, not known for her modesty, was wearing a suit that fully covered her, I assumed I'd drop the script I'd arrived with and withdraw quickly. The fact that the actresses were polite relaxed me more than it should have. Pammy was cordial enough on the hot afternoon to ask me if I'd care to swim, and like the fool I was I said, “Sure, that'd be swell.”