Girl of My Dreams (47 page)

Two nobodies, I was thinking. Of course we didn't recognize each other. Neither of us is anyone.

“It wasn't her car,” I lied. “When I told you I was calling on her behalf I was lying,” I lied again. “I hardly know her myself,” I said, managing a sliver of truth.

“The high and mighty don't want to be seen with us—not yet.”

If she didn't exactly soften when she realized we'd already been through a transaction together, her hostility lightened. Her name was originally Oriole, she told me, but she hated birds and changed it as soon as she heard the first Red speak Russian. She had been a script girl at Jubilee until she was fired for trying to organize the other script girls, stand-ins and body doubles into a union. “A union of underlings, practically throwaways,” she said. “That's what they really couldn't stand, so they canned me.” It occurred to me Katinka might be a psychological body double for Mossy. Each of them lived in certainty. “I tell you, Owen,” she said, “there's no help for it but destruction. What will we replace banks or studios or even the government with? We start over. We can't know what to build until we see the shape of the vacant lot. Then we'll figure out what to put there. First we have to make the lot vacant.”

Behind us a producer said to a director, “Six months ago I bought a Mozart letter for a thousand dollars. You won't believe what it's already worth. Take a guess.”

“There will be casualties,” Katinka said.

My rescue was provided by an unlikely source. “My boy, you look bewildered,” a voice boomed at me. I turned from Katinka the Red to the owlish gaze of Professor Bruno Leonard himself. The stout pipe-smoking professor was upon me to ask a favor. He was going to speak to the assembled troops in Gloriana's long narrow lanai room. Would I help him arrange chairs in the lanai so they all faced in the same direction? As Gloriana's lover du jour he knew both his entitlements and his limits. He put his arm around my shoulder and led me to the lanai, where the two of us set about turning the room into a miniature auditorium. “Young America, what aileth thee?” he asked, placing his pipe on an end table. “Even the most convinced of us have our doubts. I know I do.” Then this late-fortyish fugitive from upper Manhattan intelligentsia fixed me with perhaps his second-best Kremlinological stare and raised his brow expectantly.

“I'm confused,” I said, “irritated listening to zealots or even worse, to the rich talking about the poor as adorable pets who need better care.” I looked out the lanai's glass doors into the canyon below, a canyon away from my waiting shack, where I wished I were.

“I don't know that's quite what they're doing,” he said. “The Bible exalts the poor but it doesn't say they're the only repositories of virtue.” He put his arm around my shoulder again, a teacher having found his pupil. Or was it something else? Bruno Leonard was comfortable relaxing into the role of didact. He was not rigid, in fact he was Socratic, but he was eager for the play of pedagogical grilling, the Q and A that led eventually to a thesis that seemed, at least for one class section, sound. Bruno was like a career military officer who leaves the service but never quite looks right in civilian clothes; however pleasurable his frolic in Hollywood, he looked as if he belonged on campus. “Movie people out here,” he said, “suddenly find themselves richer than they ever dreamed. Is it so bad if some of them decide to help a good cause instead of buying a string of racehorses or building more swimming pools?”

“But these rich don't really want to share with the poor, only to say they feel bad about them while using them as an excuse for their politics. Isn't it hypocrit—”

“No, no” he pre-empted me, “this isn't hypocrisy at all.” He seemed to have been waiting for that word and when he heard it coming he crushed it like a gnat. “Weakness is all it is,” he said, “weakness many of them feel guilty about, as they do the amount of money they make for turning out pablum. It would be hypocritical if they were advocating revolution while secretly plotting against it. To promote a revolt but not quite be able to pull it off in your own life is only frailty, not hypocrisy. The churches are full of frail sinners, not necessarily hypocrites.”

“That doesn't bring me any closer to knowing what I ought to do.”

“About what, Young America?” The professor had found a nickname he stuck on me like a postage stamp.

“About the Party, I guess.”

“Uncertain in the precinct of certainty? All the Katinkas?”

“I suppose. How long are you staying out here, Professor?”

“Bruno, please. Until the fall term begins. Or maybe this is the love of my life. Let us not discount that possibility.”

I wasn't sure if he was referring to California, Hollywood, or Gloriana herself. If it was the latter, I thought I already could guess enough about our hostess to assume the professor would be discarded when whatever defined his season drew to a close. “Tell me,” he said, “how long have you been in durance vile?”

“At the studio? At Jubilee? About three years off and on.”

“Do you like it?”

“I do and I don't. I like working on a script I think can make a good picture.”

“Your boss was once at CCNY, where I teach.”

“I've heard he went there.”

“I wasn't a professor yet, only a section teacher. I hadn't figured out what I was going to be, if I ever have, but your Amos Zangwill stood out by being, even at eighteen, a young man in a hurry. As faculty adviser to the newspaper, where he wrote little melting-pot stories about how happy the immigrants were to become Americans, I found him a rank sentimentalist with an eye for nothing but the obvious.”

Thinking about my humiliation at Mossy's hands that afternoon, I said I didn't find him particularly sentimental.

“Then you don't go to see Jubilee pictures,” he said. But he returned to the evening's theme, trying to draw me into his orbit. “I have my own ambivalence, Owen.”

“You? Who are trying to shepherd the rest of us into the fold?”

“We'll see who I bring into what fold, Young America.” Bruno Leonard's laugh was a smothered chuckle in which he did not open his mouth—“hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm.” Picking up his pipe, he sucked on it, relighted it. He fixed me with his teacherly gaze, but I stayed a few chairs away. I didn't want the arm around my shoulder again.

“You don't exactly sound like a Doubting Thomas,” I said.

“But I am,” he said. “Pros and cons—the Left sees the inherent contradictions of capitalism, how it leads to an ever-growing chasm between rich and poor, rewards the selfish at the expense of the generous, denies laborers the fruits of their labor. Isn't it an insanity of our age that workers often can't afford to buy the products they make? The Communists are trying to offer goods and services to the masses they can never have in a capitalist society. Communists are in the vanguard of talking about race prejudice, all the prejudices that mock our democratic ideals. We are not created equal here; we are created by the capitalist system as atoms of greed, and soon we'll become more imperial than any society since ancient Rome. Only the Communists are willing to talk about class, the dirty unspoken secret of America, where the upper class pretends to be free of class bias while barricading themselves behind their mountains of money. Avarice is a sacrament in our economic system. Communism is the future of the world, Young America, preceded by socialism, succeeded by the withering away of the state.”

“I don't hear much doubt there, or any cons,” I said.

“Oh yes. What if there is no freedom and democracy under Marxism? Marxists claim to elevate the masses, but it may be that masses will have to just be masses under Communism—mobs almost—and not individuals at all. The people here tonight who have been to Russia, they've seen busy collective farms and happy factories, but these are stage sets like what you have in your studios. A colleague at CCNY has letters from Russian relatives who describe anything but a workers'—or for that matter a thinkers'—paradise. There is the unbridled power of the Party. Those who disagree with Stalin are repressed with great fervor. Capitalism could prove to be more flexible than I imagine. Sometimes I see FDR as a showboat who postures for the workers while saving the asses of the very industrialists and bankers who hate him, but it's possible his reforms will work well enough to prop up the system. In the Soviet Union, most people were happy to see the czars go, but perhaps Stalin is a czar himself. I don't know how it will turn out.”

“So which way,” I asked, “are you going to nudge this crowd tonight?”

“Come to class, Young America,” the professor said as we finished with the last of the chairs. “Oh God, here comes ABC.”

“The troops are becoming uneasy, Professor.” Bruno Leonard was being accosted by the short woman with the high pompadour and diamond necklace. Sylvia, watching me like a mother hen or bird of prey, had led her officious companion into the lanai.

“I quite agree,” said Bruno, “but Gloriana will be calling us all together.”

“Precisely my point,” said the pompadour woman. The professor introduced me to ABC, Augusta Byron Caramanlios, and told her it was, after all, Gloriana's party and she'd decide when to have him speak.

“More's the pity,” said ABC, revolving and pointing her cylindrical tower in the direction of the living room.

“Augusta Byron Caramanlios has her hates,” said Sylvia, “among whom is our hostess. Old ABC is the doyenne of the Left, or possibly the goyenne.”

Gloriana Onslow O'Brian Flower was not ready to call her meeting to order. She was celebrating her status as queen bee too joyously to want to cede attention to any drone. Like a searchlight, she flashed her authoritative sensuality around her Party party. Her nemesis, Augusta Byron Caramanlios, tried to break Gloriana's spell. The two of them were similars repelling, with the cordial perseverance of old prize fighters who have met numerous times and know one another's moves. Bruno Leonard had said ABC had to be invited because of the loyalty of her troops. She claimed they would march, strike, give money or sign petitions whenever she gave the signal.

I spied Yeatsman, a port in a storm, but he'd been collected by ABC too. “Young man,” she said to me, “you should know Yancey Ballard.”

“Know him and love him,” Yeatsman said, possibly on his third cocktail.

“Well then, Yancey,” the dowager ABC resumed, “what do you honestly make of all this self-righteous convention of insincere radicals?”

“Oh I think they've very sincere, Gussie,” Yeatsman said. “They're sincerely drawn to free booze and caviar doled out by Our Lady of the Perpetual Lusts.”

“You're wicked, Yancey,” said the far wickeder ABC, gesticulating with her foot-high hair, “but you know she's much worse because she corrupts anyone she touches, an indefatigable destroyer. This evil woman must be stopped before she destroys all Reds.”

At that instant the hostess herself swooped upon Yeatsman and ABC as if she'd heard every word. I was certain she was about to ruin her own party. How little I knew.

“Why Augusta darling,” said Gloriana, hugging her to her bosom and avoiding the Caramanlios pompadour as best she could, “you mustn't fill poor Yeatsman's ears with bile about me. Don't protest, you know you can't help it, my dear scorpion. But he might put it in a script or worse, get it into Louella's column, and then I'd have to sue your diamonds right off your lizardy neck, my dearest.”

“Oh Flower,” said ABC, using Gloriana's last name as if she were wielding a barbell. “Don't you know it's all about love, good and bad love to be sure, but all love.”

“Why yes,” Gloriana said, “in a lifetime of hearing the word
love
tossed hither and yon on the waves of rhetoric, and especially in Hollywood hearing it applied to everything from unreadable scripts to unwatchable motion pictures, I think for sheer sanctimony and linguistic perversion of the noble word
love
, you win, Augusta.”

She had sailed away before Augusta could find breath to hiss, “Serpent!”

Retreating, I bumped, literally, into the bulky screenwriter Mitch Altschuler, a true believer, jabbering to greenhorn mascot Comfort O'Hollie, who had shown up at the party out of curiosity. “I want to see what my writers are yelling about,” she told me. “I have absolutely no intention of joining you lot of screaming meemies shouting your rubbish at each other. If I wanted that I could have stayed in Dublin where the screamers already outnumber the talkers. Outdrink them too.”

But she was willing to listen to Mitch Altschuler, with dreams in his eyes, hauling as much of the Volga as he could carry to the Pacific. Just back from Moscow, he had been calling people
Tovaritch—
Comrade—at the party, especially the servants. The curly-haired Mitch, writer of detective stories for Warners, was determined to redden his movies. Turning to me, he said, “We need to write a picture, Owen, about the Russian workers, their fight against injustice—oh yes, there's still injustice in Mother Russia. The priests and the Cossacks are holding out. In the picture we'll show the conspirators, wedded to the old ways, failing to stop the new man and new woman emerging triumphant in their factories. Hollywood likes happy endings, we'll give them one.”

“One they can choke on,” Comfort said.

“No,” Mitch said, “they'll love it because good beats evil, that's all they really care about. First we make our progressive pictures, then we strike the studios.”

“Do you need saving?” said Sylvia who had made her way to us.

“Not a bit,” said Comfort, “I can listen to twaddle equally well at work or play.” She was lightly flirting with Mitch as she made fun of him.

We were joined by Mitch's literal fellow traveler, Gifford Wilsey, from Terre Haute, where he had been raised a strict Methodist. Though the two had gone together to the Soviet Union and Mitch's mother had bragged about it all over Crown Heights, not a soul in Gifford's hometown knew where he had gone. His parents were so ashamed that his father told the family's minister to consider his son deceased. Gifford was a man on stilts with rimless glasses; he had been a basketball player at Purdue, majoring in American history and becoming a devotee of Eugene Debs and Robert La Follette. He wrote movies with homespun themes—JackandJills the executives called them—but the Depression turned him from a theoretical into a practicing radical.