Girl of My Dreams (24 page)

Most stuck around town complaining. “What Jubilee wants me to do is not what I became an actor to do,” they'd say. One day an actor would realize it had been months since he was offered a picture, a year and a half since his last choice role, and he saw they were no longer tailoring material to his strengths. Publicity was still sending over fan letters, getting his name into columns, having him cut ribbons at supermarket openings. He'd wind up his ego and go see Mossy. If Mossy wanted the actor he would plead, even go down on one knee (he hadn't an ounce of pride if he wanted someone) as if he were proposing, which in a way he was. If he didn't want you he'd say, “Gee we're going to miss you” when what you'd counted on was, “I can't live without you.” After that an actor couldn't get an appointment with Ned Thoms, much less Stanny Poule.

“Get a delegation from Astor's fan club to come tell him how much they need him,” Stanny told Ned. “They plead with him to stay in pictures. That should do it.”

Mossy kept an occasional derelict in Publicity like Mickey Siskind, who had written title cards for silent movies and was a charming raconteur until he was too drunk. Mickey had once saved Mossy from being fired for going overbudget at a Poverty Row studio by writing an amusing short that made use of Mossy's outtakes in another picture. After Mickey began conversations with reporters by calling promiscuous leading ladies sluts and their male counterparts whoremongers, Stanny wanted to fire him. He knew Mossy wouldn't allow it, so he reduced the old screenwriter to a planter. Planters would call up select reporters and columnists and try to get them to print mere items, not even stories. Columnists remembered when he had been the high-priced Mickey Siskind ten years earlier and would often print the squib for old time's sake. Things like it's William Powell's anniversary and his wife wants everyone to know their union is stronger than ever. This after he'd been seen three nights in a row at the Cocoanut Grove with Jean Harlow. Mickey could still do that pretty well in 1934.

If a subtler plant were called for, Stanny would do it himself. He called Louella, for instance, when Jubilee wanted to discipline Pammy for trying to have
Mind Your Own Business
rewritten after shooting had begun. This led to a blind-item warning in the Parsons column that a certain female star was getting too big for her bodice at Jubilee and had best mind her p's and q's or else she could find herself back in Hitlerland. A cunning reminder that Pammy might have a checkered past available for exploitation by an unfriendly columnist. In this case it didn't work, and Mossy ordered a rewrite when Pammy threatened to call Louella herself and invite her to the
Mind Your Own Business
set, which was in complete disarray with a first-time director from the New York theater.

The powerful columnists, especially Louella and Hedda Hopper, were regarded with a mixture of shrewdness, fear, and hate; like the gods, they had to be propitiated. The columnists, as representatives of the public, fawned on the idols, and then hacked away at their feet to find out if they were clay—and if the feet were flesh, this naturally hurt. They always blamed their readers when talking to the stars: I hate to ask you this, Hedda would say, but your millions of fans are dying to know—are you leaving your husband/wife? Is it true you've been seeing Tracy/Stanwyck? Did you check into that desert clinic for a touchy operation/drying out/nervous breakdown? The stars were allowed to be beautiful and rich as long as they said they wished they could lead lives just like the miserable rest of us, thereby mollifying their fans' jealousy and eerie rage.

The cooperative stars were all seen to be leading their fairy tale lives, courtesy of Publicity, even in the face of tragedy. When Loretta Young's aunt lost the baby Loretta wanted for her own she was so brave she took a day off to fly east for the funeral even though she herself was deathly afraid of airplanes. Thus spake Hedda Hopper. Babies die, favorite uncles are killed by trains, parents separate, if nothing else is going on a beloved schnauzer goes off to the kennel in the sky, while the star remains steadfast.

In a publicity gimmick, Mossy was photographed handing the keys to a new Cadillac to Venetia Stackpole as the starlet's birthday present from her generous studio. It was Stanny Poule, asserting the Adamic prerogative that Mossy occasionally yielded, who came up with the starlet's name, which had originally been Bronislawa Klenkowski. “Your new name preserves your family's roots,” Stanny told her without explanation. As soon as the press had its story, a studio guard whisked the Cadillac away from Venetia. Since the studio had paid both for Venetia's abortion and for a genuinely for-keeps car to give the gas station attendant who had caused the pregnancy (only a Pontiac though), Venetia felt she was in handcuffs. She complained to Mossy when Stanny had her anointed Miss Dam Site and arranged for her to open the sluice gates at an Oregon waterway.

“Here's what we do around here, Miss Stackpole,” Mossy told her. “We make a Who? into a Wow! Any complaints?”

“No, sir.”

“Then don't let me hear any beefs about how we do it. Now get.” Mossy treated the Polish girl the way Germans treated Poles in those days.

“So the whole thing is a business of falseness?” Venetia asked the considerably more studio-wise Pammy.

“And of truth,” Pammy replied, “sometimes definitely a business of truth.”

The publicity for a new star was so blatant that at first everyone laughed about it, including the rising star. After that the star became aw-shucks modest, but he saw how the public adored him and began to think there might be something to it. Next he saw people at the studio and around town in awe of him, and finally he became so impossible no one could approach him without praise. Or her. Worse, the publicity departments, which had started the whole ball rolling, ended by believing their own words. Mossy made a specialty of knowing how to deal with stars, but even he admitted the publicity apparatus reminded him of Victor Frankenstein's laboratory. “The story of the stars,” he said, “is one third soap opera, one third Greek tragedy, and one third madcap comedy.”

One fan worked an entire year on a dollhouse for Pammy's putative little sister. Some of the press guessed that Millie was Pammy's daughter, but Stanny Poule had kept the fiction that Millie Millevoix was a sister. With the public becoming more suspicious, that was the story I'd changed the year before, the last time Mossy had ordered me into Publicity, by confecting the tale of a race car driver dying in his Bugatti at Le Mans, leaving his distraught widow and infant child.

As innocent as he wanted Pammy in life, Mossy had still put her into an early Jezebel role, a scheming housewife, almost Bovary-like but living in Indiana. “
SHE'S A TWELVE O'CLOCK WOMAN IN A NINE O'CLOCK TOWN
,” the poster blared, and everyone went to the picture, which was called
Fallen Grace
. The poster showed Pammy's negligee coming down off her shoulder, a scene not actually in the movie but carefully retouched into something risqué by the advertising department. This couldn't have been done in the Code-run prudish world that 1934 ushered in, but it had been just the ticket in 1932.

“All right,” Stanny Poule said to me. “Go see Blaine and Steerforth and write me quick cock-and-bulls of glory about the would-be somebodies so I can pitch blurbs to AP, UP, Reuters. “They'll like you because you show interest in the humdrum lives of the proletariat before they come here to have us make monsters of them.”

The department lush Mickey Siskind ambled over to me, his eyes not yet rheumy as they'd be in the late afternoon, though he hadn't bothered to shave. “You can make Blaine and Steerforth into Pickford and Fairbanks,” he said, a little wobbly and with his sour breath sweetened by rum. I nodded unenthusiastically and began to move off. “No, listen.” He grabbed my tie. “A city built on fantasy is where everything is true, nothing is factual, see? Today's hero is tomorrow's figure of scorn. In Hollywood every worm turns. You're crazy about someone or something? Wait and worry. They'll collapse on you. Only thing you can do is put whatever you love or fear into a picture. At least you'll have a record of that.”

“Then you have some records of your own, Mickey,” I said to cheer him up.

“The hell with you,” he said and shuffled off.

When he was still sober part of the time, Mickey Siskind had been assigned the original publicity of how Palmyra Millevoix came to Jubilee. Mr. Zangwill, so the press release went, was in a story conference in 1931 trying to move a writer and producer off dead center on a script about a pair of doctors married to each other, treating malaria in the tropics where there was also a smuggler the wife becomes involved with. Seaton Hackley was in the room too. “But who will we get to play the woman?” Zangwill said, according to Mickey Siskind's release. “I like that kid Bette Davis. She's got spunk.”

“Laemmle won't let her go,” the producer said.

“Crawford then.”

“Same with Mayer.”

“Stanwyck.”

“After
Ladies of Leisure
, Columbia won't let anyone else touch her.”

“All right, geniuses,” said Zangwill, throwing up his arms, “now I know who I can't get. Who can I get who will lift this part from notable to unforgettable?”

The screenwriter spoke up. “Chief, you know who's a little like Davis but sexier, something like Stanwyck but not so nasty, a little like Garbo but less foreign yet still Continental, tough like Kate Hepburn but smoother, sultry like Harlow but smarter?”

“Stop being a press agent,” said Zangwill. “Who are you talking about?”

“Palmyra Millevoix.”

“Who? Change her name.”

“Already been tried,” said the producer. “She won't.”

“What I'm saying,” the writer continued, “is she's got everything those others have, only more because she's got her own charge of electricity.”

“Let me meet her,” said the studio chief. “Palmyra Millevoix.”

When he saw her early rushes, Zangwill said it was beginning to look as though the screenwriter had a point.

This was the gist of the press release the studio sent out when Pammy's first Jubilee picture opened. Nowhere did Siskind mention that the screenwriter in the meeting was Yancey Ballard. Yeatsman didn't mind. He said the planets exist only to make the sun brighter anyway, and his magnitude compared to Mossy's was approximately that of Pluto.

Stanny Poule's phone rang. It was Mossy telling him about Trent Amberlyn's arrest. Stanny took a couple of notes and said, “Huh, I guess I shouldn't be surprised.” Then he swung right into Mossy's own Bronx patter. “Got it. It don't happen till I say it happened, and when I say it happened it ain't ever gonna happen again.” He changed his vocal pitch. “Mr. Amberlyn, who was doing research for a part in a picture, is shocked at the invasion of privacy but will decline to sue the Los Angeles Police Department on the grounds that these brave men risk their lives every day for the sake of the community … No? Okay, Mossy, I won't put out anything at this point.”

Ned Thoms picked up his phone and listened. It was Pammy. She had apparently decided to complain about the gruesome package we had opened at Red Woods. This was too hot for Ned and he handed the phone to Stanny. “That's awful, dear, just awful,” Stanny said, “You can't even count the freaks out there … You want me to do what? Forget about that, Pam, even if I'd issue such a press release asking the public to leave you and Millie alone Mr. Zangwill would kill it … No, you're a very fortunate woman but you have to pay some costs. I'm surprised someone as smart as you thinks you can clamp down … No, you're
not
entitled. Listen to me, Miss Millevoix, you're a piece of property everyone likes to look at and you're fricasseed chicken if you start to think otherwise.”

On the way to the commissary I had to detour to deliver a publicity release to a big star on loan to Jubilee. I heard music from inside her trailer, which seemed to be moving a little, oddly rocking. When I knocked and heard no answer I decided she was in the shower, so I carefully let myself into the trailer to drop off the release for her approval. A curtain separated the entrance from the trailer's main room. The record was piping a song from
No No Nanette
—“Tea for Two,” I think—and I could see on the other side of the curtain that someone was on top of the star, who was naked. When he turned his head to the side, I saw he was an equally big star. I can't mention their names even today because of course they left the relationship, if it was that, out of their decorous autobiographies, and one of them has a prominent grandson who runs a studio. But what a fuck they were having. Olympian. The room was steamy, sweat flew from the little day-bed. Laughter, panting, shrieks. I didn't want to hear; I heard. I didn't want to peek; I peeked. Her nipples were the size of thimbles. I remembered someone in Publicity saying she had the boobs that launched a thousand quips. I turned away. At last she lay there, as he did, spent. I didn't know what to do—leave the press release and run, sneak out with the pages and pretend I was never there, go out and knock again? The record was still playing loudly. I crouched like an idiot behind the curtain, an idiot whose career was about to end before it had gone anywhere. At length the man spoke. “Oh my lord,” he said, “but that was a good take.” “Uh huh,” the woman said, “one more time for the close-up.” As they began again and trumpets announced Helen Gallagher singing “Too Many Rings Around Rosie” from
No, No Nanette
, I stealthily slipped out the door and shoved the press release underneath. The trailer was rocking again.

I ran to the commissary.

The atmosphere there was jovial, a little compound of high-style cafeteria and grandstand where you stared at the Thoroughbreds. At a producers' table the conversation veered to the pluck of one man who had a property all the others admired. “Yes,” the man said, “but I don't know what to do with the heroine's best friend because in the book she's a lesbian.” “Oh, that's no problem,” said one of the others. “In the picture just make her an Austrian.”