Girl of My Dreams (52 page)

“But this isn't mainly about money,” Sylvia said. “It's about respect and acknowledgment of the importance of the work we do.”

This was met by complete silence until a carpenter spoke up whom I recognized as the man with the jellied eye who had summoned me from the garden to Mossy's house on the day of my atonement. His name was Hop Daigle. “If you'll pardon me, ma'am, for us it is about money.”

The other carpenters quickly said Daigle was right.

“They can shove their respect,” Bill Wilkins said, asserting his authority by being more emphatic than Hop Daigle. “What we want is decent pay for the decent job we do, overtime for the emergency schedules they're always piling on us.”

Yeatsman saw the only way to have the carpenters and writers link arms was to forget about screen credits, which the carpenters didn't get anyway, and professional massaging of the writers' allergic egos, from which the carpenters were blessedly free, and go forward on salaries. “Okay, we're looking at wages here,” he said as decisively as he could. “All we have to do is set a date for the walkout and calculate what we ask for, how much notice they have to give us when they want to can us. Tutor and I will meet you to decide these points at six o'clock tonight”—he turned to Bill Wilkins—“across the street at the Mopic,” which is what everyone called The Moving Picture Bar. That was where I'd fallen under Pammy's spell when I interviewed her for the press releases I wrote to enhance her fame.

As the carpenters trooped out, Comfort O'Hollie emerged from the secretaries' room with a message for me. Mossy wanted me in his office right away.

“Not a word about any of this, kid,” Larry Spighorr said to me, assuming a right of condescension since he was one of the writers who'd replaced me on the Ibsen script.

“Can't you think up a more original insult?” Tutor said. Good old Tutor.

A new assignment? A raise? Invitation to a screening where my opinion would be valued? Another humbling? In which latter case I hoped I'd have the guts to tell him to fuck himself, which I should have done two days earlier on Mortification Sunday.

Mossy was already talking as I scampered down the corridor into the royal presence. “Great day, Jant, great day for Jubilee and you. Don't expect any favors.”

Sir? I wanted to say but didn't; that kind of formal servility had always been unfashionable in Hollywood, probably because it was so blatantly honest. Warning me not to expect favors, of course, was his way of saying he wouldn't apologize.

Mossy's swept-back dark hair, with that russet tinge, was a little tousled today. “How are you, Owen?” Once he could see me in the throne room I was permitted a first name. He was less troubled than on the day he took me off
A Doll's House
, less intense than he'd been during my humiliations. He was jaunty, like a bettor whose horse has finished first in an early race, offering hope for the rest of the program. The blue cornflower I'd fetched for him on Sunday mocked me from his lapel.

As I mumbled that I was okay, I understood he'd make no reference to Sunday's mistreatment. Never apologize, never explain. Just move forward.

“I want to prepare a special script for a special star, Owen, and you may be right for this. I'll be producing this one myself, Nils Maynard will direct. You know him?”

“Sure,” I said eagerly. “What's the property?”

“The property, eh. Do you happen to know Palmyra Millevoix?”

Was he kidding? Not really, I wanted to say, though I couldn't help hearing her singing in the shower with you the other day. “Just casually,” I said.

“You're going to know her much better. Fascinating background—a star in Europe, America, the songs, the pictures, the family, her little girl, her struggle to make it here after crossing the Atlantic. I don't know yet what we'll call it, but I want you to write it, get the juice of her life from her and distill it into a great story, which she herself can star in. A fabulous picture with a fabulous star starring as herself. Think about that.”

Was he crazy? Joking? Duping me? After Sunday I hated them both. Yet this was a dream assignment. Was I the one who was crazy? He'd apparently forgotten that a year earlier he'd had me write publicity about her. “Well, this sounds very promising,” I finally said, then realizing how lame that was I added, “Best idea I ever heard.”

Meanwhile I was thinking, so Pammy's the property. How am I going to go out on strike against this lord who has just asked me to walk through the gates of heaven? But wait, I do still hate him and hate the object of his affection.

“All right, that's done. Get going.” I'd started out of his office when he said, as if it was an afterthought, “Ah, one more thing, Owen. Sit down.”

“Sure.” Oh God, now he was going to tell me about his affair with Pammy, draw me somehow into his subterfuges and duplicity. Poor Esther Leah. She was becoming, this bright woman who could have run a studio herself, a figure of sympathy all over town; Esther Leah hated the inferiors who pitied her so openly. “Poor” was her name's prefix whenever she was mentioned.

“That party you were at Sunday night,” Mossy said. “Interesting, wasn't it?”

Christ! Now he wanted to know about me and Sylvia. The hell with him. It was none of his goddamn business. Did this mean Sylvia herself was one of his innumerable conquests? He wanted to have a locker room talk about how I'd liked her in bed. Screw the bastard. “Yes,” I said, volunteering nothing.

“I know a lot of people went. Couldn't make it over to Gloriana's myself, but she's one of our great hostesses. Wonder if you could tell me who all was there?”

So he was invited himself? Why does he want to know who the people are he didn't spend the evening with? Because he wasn't invited at all, the son of a bitch, and he wants to know who the Jubilee Red sympathizers are. To my surprise, I said, “Uh, so many people were there I really don't remember. Lot of drinking. Whoever told you I was there can tell you who else.”

“Yeah, but I need the names of all the guests you can remember. You know we're being attacked, don't you, Owen?”

“No, I don't know about that. People from Jubilee who know everyone on the lot were there. I was told a couple of them spied for you.”

“Abner Prettyman is an idiot!” he said, referring to one of his more obvious plants. “Yeah there were people from Jubilee who work for me, like you yourself do, but Prettyman doesn't know half the people here and he doesn't know anyone from other studios. I'd like to have a big picture of the lineup, that's all.”

“I'm not the right person.”

“Sure you are, Jant. Goddammit, you're the best person because everyone knows you're on the square. In fact, you're the square root of square. I said we're under attack. People who favor the Soviet Union are trying to undermine our system, turn us all into collective farmers with fat wives and no property of our own.”

“That's not what they say, but I'm in no position to argue with you.”

“Damn straight you're not, Jant. You can be shitcanned off this lot as fast as I can look at you.” He glared at me. He'd brought me in here to sweeten me up with a plum, then threaten to snatch it away if I wouldn't be a stool pigeon.

“I guess that's true,” I said.

“Hurd Dawn was shitcanned off this lot, you know that?”

“Someone told me,” I said.

“Thought he was bigger than the studio, bigger than the pictures he worked on, a big artist. Around here the studio is the artist, Owen, do you see that?”

At least he was back to using my first name. “I think I do,” I said. Of course, what I'd been told was that Hurd Dawn was fired because he'd managed to get himself the salary of a director though he was a set designer. Jubilee could get half a dozen set designers—one of whom was Elise Millevoix, Joey Jouet's widow and Mossy's former mistress though I didn't know that yet—almost as good as Hurd for the amount they were paying him.

“I know Hurd Dawn was at Gloriana's,” Mossy said. “Did you see him there?”

So that was it. Mossy would start small, very small, get me to affirm something he knew already, and it wouldn't hurt the already dead Hurd Dawn. Yet by admitting I'd seen him at Gloriana's I'd pound one more nail in his coffin. I wouldn't do it, but I wanted to avoid a confrontation if I could. “I didn't see him there,” I lied.

“Uh huh. Now I know perfectly well someone who was there who you have to have seen because I'm told he was the god damn master of sinister ceremonies. Don't worry, I'm not going to ask you, I'll tell you. Professor Bruno Leonard.”

“You're playing a game with me,” I said.

“No, Owen. I
am
the game. Bruno Leonard was at Gloriana's.”

It was not a question. He liked that refrain about being the game. I thought it was safe to volunteer now. “Yes,” I said, “Professor Leonard spoke at the party.”

“Yeah, fifteen or so years ago I was a student at City College and he was just starting out as a wiseacre teacher. Spouting his adolescent pony shit all over campus about Marx and Lenin and how big things were happening in Russia where about half my old neighborhood came from and those big things were going to spread through all of Europe where the other half of my neighborhood came from. Years go by and he's grown up and the big things haven't spread but he's still spouting only now it's grown-up horseshit. I had no use for the man then and even less now.”

“He's a talker all right,” I said, wondering how much Bruno Leonard's disapproval of Mossy's college newspaper stories found its way into Mossy's hostility. “Some of what he said seems informed,” I added, “some maybe off base.”

“Off base, is it? It's pure horseshit. Now tell me, Owen, I just want to know who was in his audience. Who besides you was listening to the old wiseacre Sunday night?”

“Sorry, Mossy, when people are on their own time, I think it's their business.”

“You won't tell me then?”

“No.”

As he stared at me across his desk, Mossy stood, then apparently thought better of the declarative move, which made me expect he was throwing me out of his office, and sat down again. He shook his head. I wondered where my wormy little suggestion of a vertebra had come from. Sylvia? The general solidarity of Gloriana's party? Mossy's old nemesis, Bruno Leonard? Possibly from Mossy himself, abusing me so crudely the other day and now badgering me for names. Even a mule refuses to jump off a cliff when it's being whipped. Perhaps I saw a chasm too deep for me to jump into and survive.

“You're all nuts,” Mossy said. “This country's return to prosperity is your best hope, not some cockamamie theory about taking ownership from people who know how to be owners and giving it to a bunch of saps who have no idea what to do with anything they own bigger than a kitchen table or maybe an automobile. You Reds are all nuts.”

“I never said I was a Red.”

Mossy drew himself up into sermon posture. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “I don't know about molecules or airplanes or governments, but pictures I know. Pictures are made by studios, and studios are run by people who know how to make pictures. Actors, directors, cameramen, writers, many people help make motion pictures, but the producer pulls it all together and he represents the studio. The animals don't run the zoo no matter how pretty they are or talented; the zookeeper runs the zoo no matter how big a son of a bitch he is, and I'm the zookeeper of this zoo. You understand?”

“Of course I do. I just don't want to be a ferret or a trained seal either.”

Mossy ignored me. “If this ever changes,” Mossy said, “the picture business as we know and love it is destroyed, boom, like that. It so happens that at Jubilee and on some of the other lots around town, the animals are getting ideas they can run the zoo. We call it a Red plot, which in a way it is, but in another way it has nothing to do with the Reds, it's just egos, animals thinking they're bigger than the zoo. The Reds are using them, and they're using the Reds. Studio heads need to know who these people are that are trying to ruin our picture-making factories, worshipping false idols with their red smoke. The first thing we agreed on was the need for loyalty. Are you loyal to Jubilee, Owen?”

“I am, yes. If I'm treated fairly I'm very loyal to whoever treats me fairly.”

That stopped him for a moment; perhaps he recalled my Sunday scourging. He nodded. “I'm bringing you along here, Owen, that's why I'm handing you the Millevoix script. Is it safe to say you want to see Jubilee continue to make good pictures?”

“Yes, definitely.”

“Then, Owen, you should want to help us root out the bad influences all over town who want to stop us from making our pictures.” Mossy rose from his chair and walked around to my side of his desk. “That's why,” he said, “you must tell me who was at Gloriana Flower's home Sunday night. The producers association wants to know. A bunch of writers are in this nutty guild, as if you could unionize creative work, as if writers were no more than assembly line workers in Detroit. Ridiculous, isn't it?”

He raised his eyebrows and looked at me fondly. Why not tell him the names of the people I knew the names of? He knew most of them anyway. He was asking mostly to test my loyalty, wasn't he? He said, “Look, we don't want to hurt anyone, but we don't want to get hurt either. The producers association wants to try to help these people see our point of view, what's in all of our best interests as studio employees.”

Oh, so we were all in the same boat, all studio employees, including him. That sounded sweetly reasonable. Talk to the people who disagree with you, come to some agreement. On the other hand, if I started telling Mossy names, I might get someone fired. “The other studio heads might not be as easy to talk to as you,” I said. What the hell was I saying that for? They were all tyrants, like Mossy. And we
were
on assembly lines, weren't we, not so different after all from people making Fords and toothpaste.