Girl of My Dreams (54 page)

I said I was so sorry, and I was. The writers were as deep in gloom as the orphaned gulls after a storm has razed everything but their lighthouse itself, which provides no real comfort or protection but simply stands there as a remnant. Yeats crept back into Yancey. Bleakly, he recited: “‘A shape with a lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again.'”

26

Biopic

Zurich, Cairo, Marrakesh, Montreux, Bordighera, the Île St. Louis, Inverness, Hamburg, Palma, Tin Pan Alley and the Brill Building, Lucca, Salerno, Edinburgh, Cap d'Antibes, Russelsheim Am Main, Malta, Bruges, Lyons, the Brighton Pavilion, the Plaza Athénée, Sintra, the Parthenon, Olympia, Odessa, Leningrad, the Connaught, Chicago, the blood bank at Verdun, Barcelona, Gare du Nord, Gare de l'Est, Bucharest, Bad Nauheim, Cologne, Leipzig, Prague, Bordeaux, Linz, Schoneberg.

Gerhardt, Henriette, Giovanini, Sir George, Laurence, Gilles, Dominique, Etienne, Golo, Wolfgang, Achim, Amalfreida, Marcelle and Marcel (sister and brother), Edeltraut, Aloys, Ernst, Veronique, Max, Charlot, Julien, Paola, Gerda, Auguste, Honore, Sebastien, Beckenbauer, Theophile, Claude, Paul-Henri, Amaury, Ted, Bruce, Jonathan, Anabel, Marie-Claire, Rex, Douglass.

Places and names Palmyra Millevoix dropped from her first thirty years when I went to her studio bungalow for my initial talk with her that could lead to a biographical screenplay. She was serious, almost morose. She was utterly different from the playful gamin who had lofted material to me for press releases on the earlier occasion a year before when I'd been sent to her bungalow and she had played songs for me.

She was very precise about the type of wound she saw when, at seventeen, she worked as a nurse's aide in the blood bank just off the Verdun battlefield. Spend the time you need with her to get the juice of her life: Mossy's instructions. I wasn't going on strike and I wasn't fired, so I was collecting material for this best, most painful assignment. Pammy herself was enthusiastic about Yeatsman's desire to write his Madame Bovary script for her; she had been brought up on Emma Bovary. But she was against this biographical project. “Silly man,” she said. “Silly
men
,” she corrected herself. “How vain. They want to put in marble, and now in film, the women who interest them. It makes no difference at all to our true identities, yet they will start the Trojan War or write a symphony because of what they call love but is actually their own vanity.”

She didn't seem to include me in the category of
they
and
them
who kept being wrong about women. Was I exempt, then, from her designation of gender? A compliment or an insult that she neutered me?

Pammy did not quiver when she described the scene at Verdun—blood flowing out of and into the wounded soldiers at the blood bank—but she did sob twice in her accounts of the places and people she had known. The first time was with the mention of the names Gerda and Achim, which she breathed as though these old friends from a previous life were now in danger, and the second was when she was telling a story about Bucharest. That time I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket and offered it to her. While she blew her nose she looked at me as if she had just noticed I was there.

27

A Revel

It came to pass as Mossy had ordained that the day rolled around for the wedding of Trent Amberlyn and Thelma Thacker. Weeks earlier, Trent stood sheepishly in Mossy's hospital room at Cedars when Thelma Thacker strode in, hips first, and immediately had to stop herself from asking the boss why she'd been summoned. The man who owned her contract and had her on loan to other studios for four times what he paid her was, after all, in a hospital, possibly gravely ill. Mossy greeted her from an armchair where he sat wearing a white silk bathrobe over black silk pajamas. As much as she resented her owner, everyone in Hollywood knew he had keeled over in his office, and some of the flying rumors had him in a coma close to death. “I'm so sorry you're ill, Mossy. I'd have sent flowers, but I was afraid—”

“Don't worry about it,” Mossy stopped her. “I'm much better.”

“What a relief,” Thelma said. The fact was she wasn't close to Mossy, had never been invited to his home, and she knew as well as he did she wasn't headed for stardom even in the Westerns she made with Tom Mix, who himself was fading. The summons to Cedars was a surprise and a mystery to her. And was that Trent Amberlyn across the room? What was he doing there?

“Thelma, say a nice hello to Trent Amberlyn,” Mossy said.

The two actors shook hands awkwardly. As they exchanged the requisite pleasantries, Mossy noticed gratefully that Thelma was only about three inches taller than his bantam-sized star. Thelma had strawberry hair that was beginning to be called dirty blonde, and no one bothered to dye it because her parts as a cowgirl in black and white B pictures didn't require much in the way of glamour. She was ahead of her time in wearing blue jeans around the house she shared with Matt Sampson, the horse trainer she'd met at Republic when Mossy first had her out on loan a couple of years earlier.

Thelma was the sweet one; Matt, like any horse trainer, had a sharp tongue and could be unexpectedly gruff, especially with humans. Matt lifted the vagrant profession of Hollywood horse trainer into one that demanded skills as exacting as those needed to train Thoroughbreds for the Kentucky Derby. Born in west Texas, named Mathilda by her parents, Matt became the partner and authority figure in Thelma's life. Thelma and Matt were a fixture in the subset of the Hollywood social scene that featured lesbians. Parties in their Tarzana home were lively, musical, and were attended by women far weightier on the scale of motion picture prestige.

As a star who commanded the screen, Trent was surrounded by a magnetic field even in a hospital room, but Mossy was pleased to see that Thelma herself had an appeal that would fit well in this match. A strong chin, softened by a natural smile and eager eyes reminded Mossy why he'd signed her in the first place. She had square shoulders, nice tidy breasts maybe a half-size too small, and an outdoors body, which was precisely why she made her living where she did and not in Jubilee's dramas or comedies. An attractive girl, Mossy told himself, this may work out just fine.

“No reason to mince words or beat around the bush,” Mossy said to his two properties, one of them still ignorant that she was about to be made adjacent to the other. Mossy immediately regretted his figures of speech but understood where they'd come from. “You two nice kids are going to be married soon. To each other.”

Trent, who already knew his fate, hung his head in embarrassment. Thelma thought the boss must be teasing. “Mr. Zangwill,” she said, “I didn't know you went in for practical jokes, but this is a good one. You must be feeling lots better.”

Mossy didn't have to say anything more. Trent's posture told Thelma all she needed to know. When she glanced at her intended—intended, that is, by the patient in the silk bathrobe looking contented with himself—Trent was shaking his head.

“This is silly, this is ridiculous,” Thelma complained. “Trent and I don't even know each other and anyway people say he's … ” She caught herself. “And you know Matt Sampson and I, we're, uh, very devoted to each other. I can't marry anyone.”

“It'll be good for both of you,” Mossy said. “I'm a happy matchmaker.” He didn't add that he'd told Louella Parsons, who was ready to break the news in her column.

“Isn't there some other way, Boss?” Trent asked with a forlorn look that Mossy would never allow to be captured on camera because it was such a drastic contradiction of the swaggering he-man parts Amberlyn played.

“Yeah, Trent, there's always another way,” the studio chief said. Thelma looked hopefully at Mossy, who now arose from his chair. “The other way, Trent, is for me to let you be exposed as a fairy, which half the reporters in town are dying to do anyway. That slime Billy Wilkerson already ran a blind item about you, and Lolly Parsons saw you with that hangdog expression outside my office the day we sprung you from jail for picking up a fifteen-year-old and you came to my office with that cheese-ass Boy Boulton who I never want to see on my lot again.”

Trent Amberlyn looked even more embarrassed for being described this way in front of the woman he had to regard as his fiancée.

“All right, you want to save Trent's career,” Thelma said, “but why me? No one cares if two women share a house, and I don't get parts that need me to have a public boyfriend anyway, much less a”—and she spat out the word with disgust—“HUZZ-BANNED, for God's sake.” Thelma dragged the two syllables into an alien curse.

“I have plans for you, my dear Thelma,” Mossy said, improvising. “I've been thinking for some time it would be nice to bring you back over to Jubilee and put you in some parts where you can actually act instead of doing calisthenics with horses.”

The appeal to her vanity didn't work. “I'm happy where I am,” Thelma said, “though I wish I got half the salary other studios pay you for my services.”

Mossy caught himself flaring up. No need for this, he quickly realized. “Listen to me,” he said calmly, “both of you. Thelma, your salary is doubled as of your wedding day. Trent, your Spanish colonial has extra rooms up on Mulholland, doesn't it?”

“It does,” Trent said. “But I like to keep them for … ”

“I don't really care what you like right now,” Mossy said, turning to Thelma. “Mulholland, my dear, faces two ways, like you two lovebirds will soon be doing. You can look out at Beverly Hills and Hollywood, or you can look over at the Valley where Tarzana is. Matt Sampson will soon have a room at Trent's mansion, and no one will stop you from sledding down the hill to Tarzana for a little privacy now and then.”

“This can't happen,” Thelma said, looking for support at her fiancé, who himself saw a thin slice of possibility where he'd make common cause with his designated bride.

“Mossy, there must be a choice besides sacking me. I quite agree with Thelma.” Trent's six months at acting school in London had left him occasionally anglicized.

“That's good,” Mossy said. “I'm glad to see the two of you agreeing. It'll help your relationship, just the way it does for any of us happily married Americans.”

Mossy stepped between his two pieces of property and held each of their hands. “It happens,” he said, “I've told Louella Parsons about your engagement. She's holding the news till I release it. You'll be married in my garden. Now go have a drink with each other, make your wedding lists. Young Jant will spruce up your bio's. Meeting over.”

Appropriately, especially for Hollywood, the wedding was in June. The nuptials were celebrated under a spreading live oak in Mossy's garden. Mossy himself was safely away at Lake Arrowhead for the weekend, immune to any slipups that might mar the occasion he had dictated to the reluctant bride and groom.

There were no slipups.
Photoplay
had the exclusive on the wedding and sent a photographer and writer who covered the ceremony well enough while cordially hating one another. The reporter was shy and liked to speak softly to her subjects. The photographer barged his bulky six-six frame into every conversation, flash-bulbing away any possibility of spontaneity or intimacy. Nor did he recognize well-known personalities. “Say fellow,” he said to the especially handsome best man who was pouring Champagne for guests before the ceremony, “mind telling me your moniker?”

“Randolph Scott,” said the amused pal of Trent's.

He was a good best man, a dashing romantic actor who would look respectable in
Photoplay
. With possibly the strongest chin and most chiseled features in town, Randolph Scott was more handsome than John Wayne, though he didn't have the Duke's disdainful squint or cocky swagger. Randy's own housemate, Cary Grant, whose star was just beginning to rise, prudently skipped the wedding. Thelma's Matt Sampson was at first indignant, threatening a boycott, but Thelma finally convinced her to be maid of honor.

When she heard that
Photoplay
would be in attendance, Louella Parsons ran off in a huff to Palm Springs for the weekend with the Louis B. Mayers. She had broken the original story, improvised to her in Mossy's office the day he (sort of) collapsed, but he wanted the wedding to be a pictorial event in the premier fan magazine. Mossy promised Louella an exclusive interview as soon as the newlyweds returned from their honeymoon, for which he had paid all expenses, in Acapulco.

Many of the three dozen guests were friends of Trent's, hangers-on along with his agents and their wives. Jubilee's publicity head attended, Stanny Poule, who kept revising my proffered Amberlyn bio to make it clear this man-about-town was the catch of the decade for Thelma Thacker. Stanny was the former newsman from St. Louis who rued the day he'd signed on to become a pale imitation of Hans Christian Andersen in Hollywood. “At least this time,” he muttered to me, “we really do have a fairy tale.”

Boy Boulton hovered on the edge of the small crowd, rigid with unaccustomed decorum, afraid to indulge his trademark cackles, knowing the owner of the garden would have him executed if he were noticed by
Photoplay
or gave offense to anyone. I did hear him snicker to a friend about a slender young man who had just offered a platter of crab louie, “No use for the kid's crabs, but I'd plonk his
derrière
anytime.”

One guest at the wedding happened to know both bride and groom. He was a stately, handsome black man, a consummate actor named Burle Kince who did an Othello in San Diego in 1930, unforgettable to all who saw it. Thelma, then an aspiring stage actress, was Desdemona. Trent came down with Boy Boulton to see the performance and was effusive backstage. (So effusive about Burle Kince he met no other members of the cast, neither Iago, who was played by the emerging Franchot Tone, nor his own future wife, Thelma herself.) Trent told Burle Kince he had to come to Hollywood, had to come to the studio—Trent was then at Fox—to make his mark in movies. Trent was being sweetly naïve. Kince came up to Fox and was offered nothing but servant and handyman roles, which he refused to play. He got one part as a lacrosse player (there were no black lacrosse players but it didn't matter), another as an attendant in a gas station, and then returned to the theater, where he had only a few more roles before becoming an acting teacher at San Diego State. At the wedding he was as striking as Randolph Scott. No one in Hollywood ever saw Burle Kince again.