Girl of My Dreams (44 page)

Beth, Beth I'm scared to death

I can't say no, you won't say yeth;

Write quick, till then I hold my breath.

I won't believe if I hear
nada,

We can go where they make
pina colada
—

My devious plot is Ensenada.

Hollywood was a compact town on weekdays, but on weekends it stretched from Santa Barbara to Ensenada as people decamped for holidays, assignations, playtime. East to Palm Springs, which was barely getting started, west to Catalina Island. That was the geography of Hollywood in 1934. Beth Hammond, trying to mimic Pammy, wrote back:

Pam, Pam I don't give a damn

If the whole world knows just what I am—

Meet me at Musso's, we'll go on the lam.

To which Pammy replied:

No: you come to my verandah,

We'll say mean things, even slandah,

While we head for the border in the south

Where I'll give you my nipples, I'll give you my mouth,

And what I want is what you got;

What I don't need is what you're not

Tomorrow in the commissary

I'll be nibbling the Jubilee Cherry;

If we're on just pass and give me a winka,

We'll drive to Mexico, find us a finca.

Though I'm just a cut above a slut

You make me feel quite dreamy,

When we have lunch I have a hunch

You'll get me wet and steamy.

I'll end this doggerel with my own coda:

We won't stop till you're in my pagoda.

Paperclipped to the page was Louella's item, which I had missed: “Palmyra Millevoix was spotted in Ensenada over the weekend with the energetic” (Louella didn't dare say mannish) “Jubilee casting director Elsbeth Hammond. Where were the toreadors? Girls' night out, I guess.”

The cutting room was beginning to feel claustrophobic. I didn't like hearing about Pammy, I thought Nils's movie with her was going to be fine, taut—and I knew it was beyond what the studio would let me work on. For his current film, Billie had the close-up of Guy Kibbee from the trim bin. Cuckolded husband looking bilious, undone, deceived. As unstoppable as a careening trolley, the film ran forward again.

When the phone in the cutting room rang, it was almost noon.

The Summons.

22

Annals of Mortification

I squealed to a stop in Mossy's driveway.

A car I'd never seen, a Buick with Illinois plates, was parked in front of the massive door next to a DeSoto coupe. A man in a tan fedora came out of the house. “You Jant?” he asked. I nodded. “He wants you to wait in the garden,” he said, and sped off down Coldwater in the Buick.

I went into the garden, which began on the right of the house—mansion, to be accurate—and continued to the horizon. Aimlessly, I started down a path lined with white lilies, perky orange pistils poking up from their asymetrical centers. The vast cultivation with all its plantings made me feel invisible; perhaps I could vanish into a hedge like a rabbit, down a hole like Alice. I was such a contented subordinate, a footman grateful for leavings from the banquet table. Why had I strayed into bravado and piped myself into a pathetic fool's paradise with the notion that I could please Mossy by bringing the tennis pro to his party? Because I was in fact not a happy serf at all; I was a ruthless conniver, and the tennis pro idea happened to blow up in my face. The servile version of myself was actually my chief enemy in my desire to rise. Fear was my primal emotion. It occurred to me that it might also be Mossy's. But he clothed himself in aggressiveness and snarls while I was only an inept show-off, parading my fear in sycophancy and self-degrading complaisance.

“Bit of a reprieve here, eh?” a voice squeaked behind me. A gnome emerged from behind a potting shed, an elderly Cockney gnome, almost bald, carrying a trowel, wearing gardening clothes topped by a green vest that resembled a jerkin.

How could this little guy know what his—and my—master had in store for me? “Oh hello?” I asked, as though it were a question he could answer.

“Yes, I'd say we've had a stay of execution. Was supposed to start at noon, but if we're lucky the rain won't be here till nightfall. Good news for my roses. They love the sunshine, but they need the rain. They'll be grateful it won't arrive till after dark. Show you around, young duck?”

I was grateful he didn't call me guvnor. “Anything you like,” I said. My little tour did, in a different way than the gnome meant, postpone the inevitable.

Obediah Joyful, as he introduced himself, told me to call him Obie since everyone did. He explained that Mr. and Mrs. Zangwill had found him on a trip to England. “They'd gone to my employer, the great landscape designer Gertrude Jekyll, and invited her to California to paint them a garden. That was her attitude, each plant was only a single brush stroke to her. But the poor thing was much too old, almost blind, so she gave me her benediction. Off I went in harness to Mr. and Mrs. Z.”

Unlike the other Hollywood moguls, the Zangwills would not allow the pool or the tennis court to be focal points. They decreed an English garden but a magnified, overwrought one, excessive yet delicately planted with variegated beauty on all sides. Obie had worked with the Zangwill's decorator to make the interiors and exteriors extensions of one another. Red velvet in the dining room led to red celosias and scarlet sage, blue chintz in the conservatory gave, through leaded windows, onto lapis lazuli azaleas. The achievement of such a mature garden in a few years was the result of Obie's worldwide transplanting. Archways and hedges appeared to stretch for a mile.

A series of curved and circular spaces blunted any sharp angularity while ensuring that anyone peering from the living room would have an intriguing glimpse through floral vistas with colors only Monet or Turner could envision. Obie led me to a clearing between two semicircular ponds featuring goldfish and frogs; one was fed from above by a Venus statue whose nipples flowed with water, the other by a marble Cupid whose erect penis gushed into his pond. “The master insisted,” Obie said with embarrassment, “but when I sent the garden photographs back to Auntie Jekyll, I left out these statues. Auntie wouldn't have approved, may she rest in peace.” We walked on into the maze.

“I'm not so young myself,” Obie said. “My last birthday I was eighty and the madame started calling me an ottogeranium.”

“Octogenarian?” I asked.

“That's what I said.”

Rose-clad arches led the way through the garden, each trellis topped with ball finials. With Obie naming names of breeds and hybrids, we passed Sarah Bernhardt peonies, gentle tulips, lacecap hydrangeas, and entered a little orchid lagoon of cattleyas, Appalachian sunsets the color of areolas and gold coins, phalaenopsis Aphrodite white and purple orchids, and a canopy of Seaforth Highlanders with long violet petals fading to white at the base. Each floral carpet was a source of fascination yet Obediah Joyful propelled me onward to discover more. Here were dahlias and lupins, cactus with white hair, bleeding heart verbena sporing white petals with tiny sensual red tips, all arrayed like an army ordered by their commander to conquer the world by glorifying it.

Dazzled, I could find no superlative worthy of what I was seeing. Obie did it for me. “The rose, you see,” he said, “is a universal signal of beauty, romance, love and even perfection, and the garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience, watchfulness, industry, and it teaches trust. Trust your vision, trust the rose to match it and surprise you.”

The roses, the garden itself, seemed continuous to infinity, but Obie said, “What is it you see there, young duck?”

“More garden,” I said. “Garden on and on.”

“Walk over here,” he said, leading me to a path where I suddenly saw a small figure, no, two of them. So we weren't alone. Then I saw we were. I'd seen Obie in miniature, and myself tootling after the little man. We were approaching a wondrous, gigantic mirror. It was flanked by other mirrors almost as large. “This was no scheme of mine,” Obie said hastily. Mossy had wanted his garden to give the illusion of going on forever, endless. Only slowly, hesitantly, had I recognized I was part of the illusion.

In my own reflection I saw the sniveling, grateful apprentice as well as the ruthless conniver. This was a mirror not of nature but of wishes, vanity, fears and artifice. I remembered the little sign outside Mossy's door, “Don't come in if you want to keep your ideas to yourself.” Each of us who approached Mossy to promote anything tried to become him, use his language, his taste, internalize him to sell him some part of ourselves-made-himself, so that we no longer were our own proprietors. Mirror me, he demanded. The writer's ideas would strike Mossy as his own, and he had no trouble later in recalling them
as
his own, because they had been crafted to become exactly that, figments of the Zangwillian imagination.

Thinking to myself upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed, I asked Obie what Mossy was like to work for. “The master is good to me, amuses himself with me and thinks I don't see that though I do. Gardens teach the art of observation, you know. Mr. Z can be intense at times, grim, not as patient as he should be with his garden.”

A stocky man with a jellied eye ran up to us, breathless, asking if I was Jant. I could imagine Mossy telling him to fetch me, amputating half my name just as the man in the fedora had. Because of the ugly blind eye I recognized him as a carpenter who built sets at Jubilee; he'd been on Nils's set the day I was there. “Mr. Amos Zangwill is waiting for you!” he yelled and turned to trot back toward the house. Obie wished me luck and I told him I needed more than that. “Keep your city wits about you, young duck,” he said. I started to walk away from the giant mirror, but then, though I was embarrassed to be so in thrall to the man Obie called the master, I set off running. By the time I reached the driveway the one-eyed carpenter had driven off in his DeSoto coupe.

Mortification of the flesh. I remembered what he'd done to an old character actor with a reputation as a bully, Humphreys Fulton, who came in for a part, any part in any picture, one day while I happened to be in the office. Mossy had made him shine my shoes. I was as embarrassed as Fulton was, and all the mortification got him was an appointment with Largo Buchalter, who was looking for a butler, perhaps two days' work. Buchalter didn't cast Humphreys Fulton. At humiliation, it turned out, Mossy wasn't especially creative, only exacting. Approaching the house at a canter, I glanced at a pair of French windows on the second floor. As I looked up, a face pulled back quickly behind the gauzy curtain. I didn't care she'd been sweet to me, it was all deigning. What I imagined behind the curtain was a hard mouth, cold eyes. This was already worse than I expected.

Mossy didn't play around with a calm voice before the storm. The hurricane struck the instant he opened the door. “A lesson, Jant! Do you know what a lesson is?”

I said I thought so. I said I was deeply sorry for what I'd done. I said bringing the drunken uncouth tennis pro into his home was a terrible thing to do.

His smile made me shudder. “This calls for a memory lesson, Jant! Do you know what memory is?” His voice was staccato, precise.

“I hope I do.”

“And you know what a lesson is.”

“That too.” Though at the moment I was wishing I were dead with no memory and no knowledge of what a lesson was, no knowledge of any kind.

“You're going to receive a memory lesson. The yardman is off today so you're going to clean my pool. You're going to get a pair of my pants pressed at the one cleaner in Hollywood who stays open on Sunday. Plus whatever else I can think of. But first, up the stairs you go. Now!” Mossy gestured to the grand staircase.

I saw myself as a Chinese coolie drawing a rickshaw along, a rickshaw loaded with three fat actors comically stuffed into its small seat: Oliver Hardy, Sidney Greenstreet and Lionel Barrymore. Each had a bulging suitcase holding burglar tools and crowbars and gold ingots, anything to make the load heavier. I had to pull against the rickshaw's great weight along a rutted road while each bellowed at me to go faster.

Zangwill the Vengeful directed me into an antechamber off the master suite. Through a door I heard water running; evidently a bathroom separated me from the master bedroom. I saw an antique cobbler's bench, a child's rocking horse that had come apart and several pairs of shoes. Mossy's voice was lower here. “Take this glue,” he said, “and put the horse back together. When you've done that, shine the shoes. I have polish for each—black, cordovan, tan. Get it right. Then you'll run an errand while you have my pants pressed. You have the soul of a valet, Jant, now you can be one.”

Errand? He was gone before I could even ask what errand. Brutalized as if I were being beaten, I went about my menial tasks with alacrity, a born serf. Yet a serf not devoid of aspiration and therefore filled with a coward's contrition. Who didn't even have the pride to quit on the spot. Tell the bastard to go to Hell. I toiled at the cobbler's bench—why not?—and heard the shower come on in the bathroom. Laughter, then a serious question. “You weren't mean to him, were you? He's young and innocent.”

“Not innocent. I gave him a dressing down, which he damn well deserved, and sent him on his way.” The shower was on, spattering her. I envisaged the water splashing from her hair to shoulders I'd never see. The shower hitting her shoulders: I couldn't even imagine lower than her shoulders.

Polishing the cordovans, I wondered what would happen if I burst through the bathroom door and threw the broken rocking horse at the two of them.

A few bars of a nonsense shower jingle drifted out. “In the kingdom of soap, the soapless lose hope, So get me the soap or I'll go into a mope and fetch me a rope, Don't you dare grope till you hand me the soap because I'm soaplessly in love … but not with you-hoo-hoo-hoo.” Listening, or rather unable not to listen, I tried to console myself by recalling that Cole Porter was said to have said she was good only for ditties.