Girl of My Dreams (45 page)

I finished my tasks swiftly and was downstairs waiting for the next labor—would there be stables to shovel clean?—before Mossy pranced down in a change of clothes, twill slacks and a green shirt resembling Obie Joyful's buskin. The squire descends. And condescends: he was in a better mood. Did he know I'd overheard them, and was that part of his pleasure? He handed me a rumpled pair of pants and a section of a script.

I looked at him, a despot, and tried to imagine her upstairs, tried to imagine lower than her shoulders. The two of them together. I couldn't.

“After you have the pants done, Owen, take these pages to Sylvia Solomon's house,” he said, “and wait while she reads them and dictates changes. Then bring them here so I'll have them for tomorrow morning. And a boutonniere for my lapel. Chung's florist on Santa Monica Boulevard. They have a blue cornflower I like. Get going.”

He was much calmer though he clearly wanted me out of there before she came downstairs. Maybe he had forgotten about the pool. Surely he had little flowers in his garden that would have sufficed for his lapel. But that wasn't what this was about. I saw the pages were from
A Doll's House
, from which Gravier and Stallworth, the writers who replaced me, had now apparently been dismissed. The despot continued: “Another part of your lesson, Owen.” (At least he was now using my first name.) “Will you tell me why I'm calling this picture
She's A Doll
? I'll tell you why—because Nora herself, after a big struggle at last realizes that is exactly who she wants to be. She wants to have his pipe and slippers ready for him when he comes home, she wants to show other women this is how to be fulfilled and happy, she wants to tease him, ever so gently, about his golf game, and most of all she wants to be kept barefoot, maternal and in front of the stove.”

I dared to add gamely, “In front of the stove with a bun in her oven he put there.”

He snickered. “Tell Sylvia to look at my notes on the zoo scene and also the leaving home. Now beat it.”

I drove back and forth between Hollywood and Beverly Hills to complete my labors, wondering if I could put some kind of poison in the blue cornflower. I'd shined the shoes to make them look like mirrors. The way officers in the Army made their butt boys do. I did it. Lord, I did it, despising myself more than him. He'd returned to Lidowitz's and my early title—
She's A Doll
—that he'd rejected so convincingly I'd come to hate it myself. Did he remember it had been the title on my treatment?

Sylvia Solomon lived in the flats of Beverly Hills, still elegant, beyond anything I could even wish for, but below Sunset Boulevard. In her ultramodern house, a Richard Neutra, she warmed up the cool stark lines with deep pile carpets and furniture upholstered in colorful Italian designs, almost baroque in their lushness, that Neutra would abhor. Sylvia was the first screenwriter, male or female, to take home four thousand dollars a week. She waved me in with her cigarette, wary because she knew who had sent me, but she was friendly. She offered me a smoke and a drink, which I turned down, and she could see I was essentially hovering to get her to work. “How dare his royal Mossiness interrupt my Sunday afternoon Schubert”—a statement, not a question, delivered in a husky voice tinctured with cigarettes and gin—“I'm giving him nothing until tomorrow noon, if then.” Reluctantly, she plucked the needle from her phonograph.

“He doesn't want much,” I said, “just your take on a couple of scenes he has already made notes on.” I hoped she didn't know I'd worked on the script myself.

“Do you realize what he's doing with
A Doll's House
? And what I'm collaborating in? Jubilee Pictures is repealing the declaration of independence for women, written to our shame by a man, and turning the great Ibsen into a shill for traditional subjugated domesticity. Shit.”

This was her warmup, the warmup of self-contempt I saw many writers perform before plunging their talents into an assignment that made them drink more and think even less of themselves. She looked at the pages. “Ah well,” she said, “at least Mossy isn't quite as loathsome as Gravier and Stallworth. Those two buffoons should be battered to death with their own typewriters by the even more loathsome Colonel DeLight.” I said I thought Colonel DeLight was sort of the advocate for writers at Jubilee, someone who stuck up for us against the bullying of the executives. I didn't mention I'd been suspicious of him myself since he hustled me out of the room filled with the Mexican seamstresses.

“Colonel DeLight,” she mumbled, not looking up from the script, “wishes he could fire the writers and have monkeys write the scripts. Count your fingers after you shake his hand.”

She was silent for a minute as she studied the pages. “No,” she said, “Mossy's not as bad as Gravier and Stallworth. You ready to write, Owen?”

“Pencil poised, legal pad balanced on my knee.”

“All right, the zoo. We're sketching scenes, not rewriting the damn script.”

Zoo? I wondered. I hadn't even had a zoo in my version.

“A horrible scene in a dinky little smalltown excuse for a zoo,” she went on. “No, the hell with that, it's the god damn circus. This town wouldn't even have a zoo, but a traveling circus they could have. Mossy will just have to spend a dime and get more extras along with a few more animals in cages. Put in the circus. The family is coming out of the big tent, two parents, two excited kids. Nora is bored. Tom—we're still calling Torvald that, aren't we?—is herding everyone to the car and home where he wants Nora to make dinner for some of his golfing pals. She's disgusted. The kids want to see the bear in his cage. The bear is being fed after performing and as the family watches, the bear swats his trainer and piles out of the cage toward the kids. Nora sweeps her children out of the way while Tom pushes a vendor's stand in front of the bear. It's an ineffective gesture. The bear overturns the stand and lumbers toward Nora and the kids. Nora takes an iron pipe that had held up the canopy over the vendor's stand, and she hits the bear as hard as she can on the nose. The bear is stunned and in pain, and by now the animal keepers and trainers have surrounded it. In the car Tom says his little birdie Nora was a very good birdie but he's proud he pushed the vendor's stand in front of the bear since it saved them all. Close-up on Nora with a men-are-idiots look on her face. Hah! End of scene.” Sylvia was temporarily appeased by her modest rebellion.

“Gravier,” she said, “had Nora cowering with the children while Tom battled the bear. Who's the driver in this picture anyway? Not goddam Tom, for Christ's sake. Nora's the driver. The way they wrote it even my aunt wouldn't have agreed to play Nora. The husband should never push the action, it's really almost a minor part, a foil. Nora's much too passive in the earlier script. Claudette Colbert wouldn't touch it, Joan Crawford would spit at it. Did you get my take on this, Owen?”

“I think so,” I said, still scribbling.

“Good. Let's head for the finish line. Nora leaves home. Cut Torvald's promise to make things better for her—I mean Tom—and have him just ask if she knows what she's doing. She knows, all right. She's leaving this dumpy Wisconsin backwater and her dinners for people he's about to have his bank foreclose on, and she's heading for Chicago to work in an advertising agency, no, to do publicity for an American tour by Gertrude Stein, a free woman if ever there was one. Take that, Gravier and Stallworth. Tom is furious, insisting her home and her duties are in Wisconsin, but she is even more furious. ‘I don't hold,' Nora says coldly, ‘to your concept of duty, either yours or mine.' Tom is speechless with rage and disbelief, but it is the rage of a weakened man who can't control anything in his life anymore, especially his wife. Nora remains firm. Mossy's right to cross out Gravier's ridiculous moment of having her begin to melt. She never wavers here. Seeing that his fury has no effect, Tom slows down and tries his sweet little birdie approach the way he used to, the way she used to like. Nora no like anymore. The scene ends with Nora slamming the door and heading with a single bag for the bus that will take her to the big city. Put a note at the top. We're changing the title. From now on it's She's NOT a Doll, put NOT in caps. Let Mossy choke on that one. I bet you aren't used to taking dictation, Owen.”

“No.” But I'd come to expect anything today.

“Not the way it usually is, is it? An older woman giving dictation to a younger man. Usually just the opposite, and when they're all through the older man chases the young thing around his desk, ha ha. Sure you won't have a drink, Owen?”

I was still catching up to her scene dictation.

“But,” Sylvia continued, “but the sequence doesn't quite end there, unfortunately, because I have to add the part I'll hate myself for in the morning but that hints at last-reel redemption for Tom. He follows her out with the two children in hand, and we see Tom, a saddened and remorseful Tom, watching Nora leave, and we feel a twinge of sympathy for a chastened man who is burdened with the chores and the children as well as his job, and who may just have learned a bit of a lesson. Scene: she'll arrive in Chicago. But that's enough. My typewriter's over there, Owen, blank pages on the left.”

As I typed fast and Sylvia went through two more cigarettes accompanied by gin, she became enthusiastic. “I know what we'll do with her in Chicago,” she said. “Nora's going to be just fine—for a while anyway, sending a little subversive signal to the ladies out there.” She laughed at herself. “Now rush this over to Mossy, will you honey?”

Honey, I thought to myself. What does that mean? We're social friends now? You're a nice kid, don't let Mossy beat you up too much? Run along little boy?

I was gathering the pages and proofing my typing when Sylvia spoke again.

“How would you like to go to a party tonight, Owen … ?”

I interrupted her with a question of my own. “Did you say publicity or agent for Gertrude Stein?” But I had also heard her question. She wanted me to go with her to a Hollywood party. Then all Mossy's humilation was almost worthwhile because now this rich prominent Hollywood writer was taking me seriously. Anyplace she went would be touched with gold. Maybe Fairbanks would be there. Pickford. A young star like Cary Grant or a king like Chaplin himself. This was my chance that came about because I did something stupid with the drunken tennis pro. Sylvia herself was pretty, I was beginning to see, not exactly pretty but sexy, a lower lip that beckoned when it didn't have the cigarette resting on it, a nose that pointed with possibility, eyes that asked a question.

“I meant publicity,” she said, “but if it came out agent don't worry about it. Hurry, will you, honey? I was asking if you'd like to come to a Party meeting tonight. You can make it if you drive fast and make short work of old Mossy.”

“He has things he wants me to do.”

Predictably, Sylvia was indignant. “On a Sunday! How can you let him treat you this way?” She seemed to feel it was an insult to her that Mossy made me an errand boy. And she didn't even know about the shoes, the pants, the boutonniere.

“This is how I'm learning the business, I guess.”

“It's no business,” she said. “It's handcuffs made of platinum.”

“Yours maybe,” I said. “Mine are just steel like regular handcuffs.”

“Well, hurry,” she said, and then she added, “Please.”

A Party meeting, I thought. That meant Party with a capital P which meant only one thing in this town, and no way to get out of it. I was not an equal to Sylvia Solomon, certainly not a date. I was merely a potential recruit.

Mossy was pleased with the changes. “Count on old Sylvia to come up with something I can use and an audience can eat. This will turn into a script I can show Stanwyck. I've decided I want to wear gray shoes tonight after all. Shine them up.”

“I thought I'd done my penance,” I said.

“Not yet. The gray shoes and polish are here in the butler's pantry.”

“I … I have an appointment. I'll be late.”

“Sylvia hitting on your bones already?”

“No.”

“Sure she is. What I said is go shine my shoes. Now. Maybe we'll forget about the pool today. But this is a memory lesson, young fellow. Get cracking.”

Which I did. My final labor for the day. Degradation complete. If I were in something like
Pilgrim's Progress
, I was about to be released from the Vale of Shame.

Why did he treat me, or anyone, like this? A better question, I knew, was why did I let him? The answer to the second question was simple. If I craved preferment—and I did—where else could I make $275 a week in 1934?

At my house, where I quickly changed into clean clothes for Sylvia, a telegram awaited: GENERAL STRIKE MENTIONED STOP WHEN WILL FANTASY PEDDLERS DROP GILDED GUARD AND BE SOCKED BY REALITY STOP QUIN

23

On the Night in Question

Did I even know how to dress for a Communist Party party? I was too young not to wear a tie. When I called for Sylvia she looked better—slinky—and didn't smell of cigarettes or gin. Catching my glance, she said, “A nap and a bath still work wonders on an old dame, don't they?” Her perfume was faintly verbena, alluring if not exactly seductive.

The gathering of the faithful was in Santa Monica on La Mesa Drive at a large white stucco house with a red-tiled Spanish roof. The back of the house overlooked the Riviera golf course and great sward of polo field in Mandeville Canyon, divided by a hill from where my Sumac Lane shanty squatted in Santa Monica Canyon. So many cars were lined up on La Mesa that two uniformed Mexicans were running back and forth parking them. “That's a hoot,” said Sylvia as we pulled up in her Chrysler, “valets at a Red rally.” I saw some Chevys but they were outnumbered by Pierce-Arrows, Lincolns, Cadillacs. Two couples arrived in chauffeur-driven limousines. They were a hoot too.