Girl of My Dreams (3 page)

But that was later. First she returned to Europe for most of the Twenties. Palmyra knew the expatriate Americans but did not belong with them. She sang in all the continental capitals, and almost as an afterthought she became a mother.

Finishing my private concert in her bungalow, Pammy said, affecting an all-purpose European accent, “Vair can ve go for some absinthe?” Off we went, she still in her polkadot housedress and I in my flapping wide tie and wider lapels, across Venice Boulevard from Jubilee to The Moving Picture Bar, the low-ceilinged studio hangout. We were brought double Scotch sours. Photographs of Jubilee notables, including of course La Millevoix herself, speckled the walls. “So what do you want to know?” she asked.

My eyes bulged. I wanted to know everything. “I suppose to begin at—”

“I was born at Strasbourg, I think,” she laughed, “but make up whatever you like, that's what I do. Not as old as the century, two years younger than Mossy—but never mind, you'll make that up too.” Listening to her I did detect some kind of accent, but I couldn't locate it. “You'll be torn between having me ten years younger than I am and needing me to be old enough to be the respectable mother of a six-year-old in this year of someone's lord 1933.”

When she passed quickly over what she called a macabre Belgian convent in Ghent, followed by her finishing school in Switzerland and on to her time in a Berlin cabaret and then to the Paris stage, it occurred to me to ask about her husband.

“Husband?” She looked as though I'd struck her or perhaps used a Sanskrit word she didn't understand. “Ah, Millie's father, of course.
Tragique, mon cher, tragique.
Say what you will. I'll be amused. Try me,” and she winked, “on my love for America.”

Press releases tumbled from my Royal. Admittedly purple, the words were not about love but enchantment. I typed of how, for her closest friends, Palmyra Millevoix would elide from her own “inimitable” songs into Rudy Vallee's Vagabond Lover, which she sang low and a little husky, not almost falsetto and defended the way Rudy did. For the signature phrase, “I'm just a vagabond lover,” she brought the words to great length and held them there, roasting her chestnuts until they were done to the crisp she wanted, before she rushed in with, “In search of a sweetheart it seems,” which she sped through as one might rifle a drawer, until she reached the final syllable. She held “seems” for four created notes so listeners would be drinking from her voice as from a fountain in the village square, preparing them for the last words of the song, “The girl of my vagabond dreams.” She held “dreams” until you knew it was a village square you reached after a long, parched pilgrimage, a search, home to the home of your heart.

I was so carried away I made Millicent's father a daring French aviator dying heroically in the final days of the Great War. Someone in Publicity, which had earlier maintained Millie was a little sister, pointed out that Millicent Millevoix would have to be a teenager if her father were killed in a war that ended fifteen years earlier. I made the father into an Italian nobleman who died when his Bugatti crashed at Le Mans.

What I left out of my press releases was that when Pammy made her way to Hollywood in early 1930 she had been forced to change her name. Palmyra was too ugly, Millevoix too foreign. Her acting name became Pamela Miles. She was shoveled around to several studios until an executive said she obviously couldn't act but he needed bodies, sounding like a general demanding fresh troops if only for cannon fodder. He insisted she be made a platinum blonde. Pammy herself called her hair dirty blonde, but it carried a trace of animal red; it reflected her features and expressions. Her open gait, legs a little apart—challenging as a no-nonsense honey blonde with russet tones—looked only slutty in platinum blonde. Platinum was just right for Harlow, just wrong for Millevoix. Her flashes of anger, which looked attractively subversive with a wink of humor, were mere petulance in platinum, spoiled petulance at that.

“I don't know why any of you wanted me at all,” Pammy sighed to a Warner Brothers producer, “when all the studio does is alter me like a dress. They change my name, my nose, my hair, hide my ass, make my breasts look like ice cream cones. The only things you leave alone are my ears and teeth. Everything else you pad, chop or mash.” “Oh no,” her producer told her, “we'll get to your teeth in good time, have to close that gap between your canines and bicuspids so there's no space between them when you flash that Grand Canyon smile.”

She made four pictures at Warner Brothers, one silent, three talkies, all turkeys. Then Pamela Miles, heartily sick of what she was doing, walked a picture whose director bullied his actors with bad line readings. After she told the studio the picture was arch and witless, they suspended her. Her agent warned her disobedience in this town is like poison to the Medicis. Warners had their planter call the gossip queen Louella Parsons.

In her column Louella hectored. “Kids these days always know best, but if I were young Miss Miles, fresh from what some call the seedier precincts of the Continent, I would special delivery my lucky bosom back onto the set of
Baby Can't Play
pronto if not sooner.” As unjust as she felt the Warners campaign was, Pammy wouldn't budge. She was through with Pamela Miles. “If Greta Garbo can get away with a name that un-American,” Pammy said, “I may as well fail as myself since I'm a complete disaster as someone else.” She did what other actors and actresses only wished they could do: she went home and wrote a hit. Two actually, under her own name.

“Born Blue” was declamatory, with the tempo of speech but chanted musically, nourished by the Deep South blues she had begun to listen to on what were then called race records. After an up tempo verse that warned listeners, the sweetly mournful chorus:

If you hear this song in a bar or a train,

Put a nickel in the Wurlitzer and play it again:

Born blue, born blue,

That's me, not you,

You can make me laugh, you can make me cry,

Sometimes you make me want to lie down and die

'Cause I was born blue, it's always been true.

No matter where I go or what I do

It's what I know, what I've been through,

For I was born, I was born, I was born blue.

She ripped into the last two lines with a blowtorch:

I was born, yes I say born, my heart is torn, Mister blow it on your horn—

'Cause I was born blue.

This became a signature not only for herself but for millions who had the Depression surrounding, defining their lives. Yet Pammy knew a record that was only sad would have a limited appeal to fans who also wanted to kick up their heels and simply sing. She wrote the flip side of “Born Blue” as a playful melody that could be sung anywhere at a party or by a barbershop quartet. Here's the verse to “Can Sara Wear a Pair 'a Dungarees”:

When I see a pretty girl in tights

I wonder how she spends her days and nights;

Though I really hate to bother

I'll just have to ask her father

If she can go informal

And still be mostly normal

At the party, it's the biggest one in town,

On the dance floor if she doesn't wear a gown.

The crooning chorus was belted by male singers as if they owned it:

Oh,

Can Sara wear a pair 'a dungarees?

I'll ask it sweetly, I'll go down upon my knees—

Hear my prayer, Mr. McDougall, I know you're kinda frugal,

So can Sara wear a pair 'a dungarees?

Mr. Mac said there'll be rumors

If she don't stay in her bloomers;

This ain't what me and Pearl

Had in mind for our little girl,

So Sara wears no pair 'a dungarees.

But Mr. Mac, when Sara's gone to college

Where profs impart the knowledge

And parcel out those bachelorette degrees—

She's bound to want to wear a—

And I'll take care of Sara

If you'll only listen to my fervent pleas:

When she's gone off to Bryn Mawr

With Aunt Sadie's kid Lenore,

Sure then Sara wears a pair 'a dungarees.

For its time the song was slightly risqué, just edgily modern, since it did assert the right of women to wear pants. After Pammy's record came out, Eddie Cantor quickly followed with his own version (of course, he wouldn't touch “Born Blue”; Bing Crosby did but his jaunty recording didn't attempt the anguish in Pammy's) and for a while Rudy Vallee had more requests to sing about Sara in her dungarees than even “The Whiffenpoof Song,” his own standard. Pammy was bringing in over sixty thousand dollars a month from both songs during their heyday.

There was a problem trying to start a motion picture career over again, but the solution became Mossy Zangwill and Jubilee Pictures, which bought her contract from Warners in late 1931.

In quick succession, the reborn Palmyra Millevoix played Mary Queen of Scots; a war-widowed singing mother struggling to make it on Broadway (art imitating life imitating art, in my attempted legend); and an English doctor trying to wipe out a plague in India where, naturally, she meets Ronald Colman.

Her star had risen. By 1934 she was who women wanted to be. And men wanted.

3

Assaulting Ibsen

Early Saturday, two weeks after the demise of Joey Jouet, I lay on my living room floor confronting the ceiling's jagged crack—sinister some mornings, today a bolt of lightning—and began the tantric exercises everyone was doing for digestion, muscle tone, eternal youth, the optimistic Southern California compound then and now. “I am monarch here,” I said aloud. “No one can top or stop me because I am the march of my generation. A monarch who rules his fate.”

Such a fool. I am. Better to know or not know you're a fool? I'm the sucker who tells the story because the rest are gone. Or, like Mossy, ageless, now refusing to read books, especially if they're about him. Doing the exercises I wondered if Joey, motorcycling into the Pacific, had died of fright. No, that wasn't Joey. He was dead on impact then, with a broken neck, as if he'd hanged himself? Or did he drown, like a fisherman swept off his lobster boat by a wave he hadn't seen coming?

I was catapulted into an obsession by Joey's suicide as effectively as if he'd hurled flaming branches at my walled castle, igniting every chair and curtain inside. Because Pammy asked me for a favor I surmised I had her favor. The hope that plants a seedling of itself in a young breast is as much curse as blessing since it drains every moment of contentment. Potential is always rearing its greedy portentous head. The joke was that she hadn't even made use of the favor I did, speaking no words at the funeral.

My castle was a shack, tucked on Sumac Lane in Santa Monica Canyon. A closet of a bedroom, bathroom with a stall shower, kitchen with a card table in it, and the tiny, dark living room with two wooden chairs, an empty crate for a coffee table, and a secondhand couch I kept doilies on to avoid having to look at the stuffing that leaked from either end. It wasn't as though I had visitors. Yet when I looked out at the sycamores and eucalyptus climbing the hill to where associate producers and car dealers lived who could afford much more than my prewar forty dollars a month, I was happy.

By prewar I mean pre-prewar because in 1934 only the most prescient—Winston Churchill and a smattering of hypersensitive Jews—thought we'd ever be fighting the Germans again. The booming Twenties of my teens had passed quickly, hollow though the boom was, while the Depression Thirties were dragging ponderously. But for me at twenty-four, there was already a job in pictures, this compact shelter, and Palmyra. Mine was a love all the more precious for being unknown to its object.

Nor was it only Palmyra. It looked as though I was getting on in the world. I'd been praised for my idea about two sets of robbers coming to knock over the same bank unaware of each other; Gable and Cagney, as polar opposites, would be perfect for the two gang chiefs, or try Eddie Robinson if we couldn't get Cagney. I'd been invited to Mossy's big party, I'd had lunch with Trent Amberlyn and Fred MacMurray, everyone had seen Palmyra Millevoix—yes!—blow a grateful kiss to me as I left the commissary, and I'd been assigned
A Doll's House
, which four other writers had failed to lick.

At this time, early 1934, I was disguised as a blank page on which other people wrote orders, urgent entreaties, or merely a list of chores. A writer, yes I was that, but a derivative, complaisant sort who wanted only to oblige, not to express a self at least as hidden from me as from others. Watch what I do with my treatment for
A Doll's House
, I said to my estranged self, never mind Ibsen: I didn't need approval from the dead. I'll give them a Nora tougher
and
more lovable than he had.

The kiss from Palmyra, blown across two tables and observed by a squadron of my betters, was the result of my providing her a stanza she meant to use in a song she was writing for a picture she wasn't in and hadn't even been set to score. Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields had been writing the melodies and lyrics for a musical with a kid in it who was always being teased by taller boys. The producer felt that if the kid, played by Mickey Rooney, had a song of his own it could literally beef up his character. When McHugh and Fields, who Hollywood said ripped up the Depression and threw it away with “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” returned to New York for a show that meant more to them than this movie, it was natural for Palmyra Millevoix to be asked to fill in with a couple of numbers. We were kind of a family at Jubilee—larger and more loving than our original families in many cases, if also more contentious—and it was just as natural for Palmyra, who was busy starring in two other pictures, to reach down and ask a junior writer if he had any quick thoughts for a song Rooney might sing. The next morning I handed her assistant these lines: “Please don't call me Shorty anymore:/ I find it nasty and it makes me really sore;/ If you must talk about my height,/ Be prepared for me to fight/ Until the day comes when I've left you on the floor.”