Girl of My Dreams (57 page)

“Nothing about Mossy, not his charm, not his problems as a kid, certainly not his position as head of the studio, excuses his rotten behavior. Running a sweatshop with the Mexican women sewing costumes, screwing the writers, hiring a musician who beats women, all the rest of it—the man has to be stopped, at least taught a damn good lesson.”

“But how will hurting Cy Henscher hurt Mossy Zangwill, who probably doesn't even like the guy?”

“He's depending on Henscher to score his stupid picture. If Henscher doesn't do it that will hurt Mossy. Anything that hurts Mossy teaches him a lesson, and he's a man desperately in need of a lesson. Will you help Elise and me?”

“I told you I would.” Another lesson, like the one Mossy doled out to me.

“I knew I could count on you, Owen.” She came toward me to give me a quick kiss and a strange thing happened. I went for her right cheek, but she was going for my left cheek, and we wound up with each other's lips. She started to laugh and at that instant our teeth clicked together accidentally. Her lavender breath.

As if beckoned, Millie suddenly came in from her nap, still rubbing her eyes. Some days she was allowed to nap in her mother's bungalow at the studio. Costanza traipsed behind her. “I hope is okay, missus,” she said.

“Of course it's okay, Costanza.”

“Uncle Owen, did you see the picture I drew.”

“A picture with a story,” I said. I'd seen the picture pinned to the wall when I walked in. A bear was climbing a thick tree toward a beehive.

“The bear's going for honey to feed her children,” Millie said. “She'll get stung a lot, but she'll get the honey. Then they'll all go to sleep for the whole entire winter.”

“Millikins, Millikins, let's be sillikins,” said her mother. “First, let's sing.”

Pammy started “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” We sang it as a round. Millie joined in several bars later, and I brought up the rear. Awkwardly. Millie looked directly into my eyes and smiled as she sang. Pammy looked at me plaintively. I wanted to get out, couldn't, and we sang several verses, Costanza joining me with her eager but toneless Spanish accent. At last the fleece had been white as snow for a third time, and Millie jumped into my lap. “Uncle Owen, are you my best friend?”

Before I could answer and while I was pondering how many best friends she might have, Pammy said, “Uncle Owen is certainly our very good friend.” To which Millie said, “Isn't he cute?” To which Pammy answered, “He's cute and he's loyal.” To which Millie asked, “What's loyal?” To which Pammy said, “You can count on him.”

Loyalty again. Owen the Loyal, just the way Mossy wanted me to be. Did anyone ever ask whether loyalty was a synonym for submission?

As I left, I saw them pretending to be a mother bear and her cub, getting set to hibernate after they find a beehive filled with honeycomb in the woods.

I considered Mossy. His early search for a vague equilibrium between art, women, and ideas had been bent by Hollywood and his own weaknesses into the chase for money, sex, and power. But what a showman. He would put on a show for me when he wanted something out of me, for Pammy when he wanted her, probably at home when he wanted Esther Leah and his children to see a devoted husband and father, and he put on a show for the whole world in his pictures. His moods might begin as roles he was playing, but they became biting realities for those he victimized. His showmanship was fate for those he fired during hard times or years later cast into the erupting blacklist volcano. In each case he would promise someone that he wouldn't let temporary advantage, fashion, or the political moment dictate to him, and then—intermission over—he would resume his role.

Yet even a master showman sometimes forgets it's a show, as Pammy had said of Mussolini. Mossy could overestimate his power, underestimate the impact of his whims on others, think himself above the law, more important than presidents or kings or his New York financiers. He was capable of forgetting he was doing a show, of briefly believing he had divine powers. Then he would stumble. The other moguls themselves all found out, now and then, that their powers were not quite divine. At various times and for different reasons Mossy tried to ruin Darryl Zanuck, Clark Gable, Cecil B. DeMille, Sam Goldwyn, and Joan Crawford. He failed, just as Jubilee occasionally turned out flops. Mossy had the quality, though, of a rubber ball. Throw him down, he pops back up.

But now Pammy wanted to teach Mossy a lesson in knowing when an experience was a show and when it wasn't. Whether her motives included anger, jealousy, or moral conviction, Pammy was determined to bring Mossy out from behind the roles he played. The purposed downfall of Cy Henscher would be the occasion.

Manipulative as he was, Mossy wouldn't have admitted to any specific motive at all. Elusiveness was a major feature of Mossy's life as well as an almost insurmountable obstacle to his understanding it. Yes, he was driven but only by simple hunger: I want, therefore I am. I will possess, I will fuck, I hire-fire, I control. That was Mossy.

I, on the other hand, was so full of motive as to be owned by it. Yet I pointed myself in opposite directions. I wanted to be the best toady and to be patted on the head for this as if I were a Labrador retriever, but I also wanted to mount the hierarchy, to rise, to rise riskless, inoffensive, approved of, as though I were the Gilbert and Sullivan office boy who never went to sea yet rose to rule the British Navy. Breaking the laws of physics, I was without mass, without velocity, yet so desperate to please as to be full of energy. Thereby defying Einstein, newly arrived in the United States and all the rage; children were labeled little Einsteins if they could multiply seven times eight. As for Mossy, still a young man but with an old man's eyes, his unleashed destructiveness was no less wanton than electrons released from bondage, as indiscriminate and unsparing of the innocent as of the guilty. His formula was simpler than Einstein's E=MC
²
: I do what I do because that's what I do when I do it. He was direct while I was indirect.

Yet Mossy and I had one ineradicable passion in common. We both loved the same woman. He had her, or had had her; I didn't, couldn't. She left him, or swore off him the way a drunk swears off rum, and she might return the way the same drunk falls off the wagon. “My damned addiction,” she confided to Teresa, cursing herself for making Esther Leah's life all the more difficult. No one ever knew how much Esther Leah knew, but the Zangwill children now and then would find their father on the couch in his den early in the morning. If they asked why, he would tell them he'd been so restless in the night their mother had asked him to leave the master bedroom.

When he was in a political mood Mossy would say that if America is ever defeated it wouldn't be by the Hitlers but by our own amnesia. We'd forget what was best about us. On that he and I could agree. But then we'd disagree on what it was that was best. Mossy liked the cowboy's America. If someone—Indians or sheepherders or squatters—was where you wanted to be, sweep them out of there no matter what you have to do. God anointed us the nation of destiny. That was where Mossy and I would part company. I would incline to the Jeffersonian view of America as experiment. Just because it cured you once didn't mean the same medicine was good for every illness. If something wasn't working don't throw good lives after lost ones, good dollars after bad. Try something else. Keep on changing, improving, experimenting. Mossy would take chances in his personal and professional life, but he didn't believe in political risk. I was the opposite, afraid of my shadow in a personal encounter, numb to the perils of ideology.

Leaving the Millevoix bungalow, I was buoyed like a teenager by the teeth kiss. She did like me, or she needed me, needed me for something, knowing I'd do anything. The next day Pammy called me in the writers building and put her sister Elise on the line. Elise asked if I'd meet her in the commissary for lunch. Fine, I said, and we met over sandwiches. It was an odious plan she presented to me. I said I couldn't go through with it. Elise smiled and told me okay, I should take care of my career. They'd get someone else who really did care about the mistreatment of women and about Mossy's arbitrary high-handedness. “All right, all right,” I said, “I'll do it.”

Elise Millevoix Jouet wanted to do anything to hurt Mossy, and as a friend of Race Honeycut's she was horrified at what Cyrus Henscher had done to her. Elise had arranged to be assigned as set decorator for the new scenes in the Atlantic City romance Cy Henscher was making story changes and composing music for. She had called the brutal songster, welcoming him back to Jubilee and expressing delight that she'd be working on the same picture he was scoring. She added that she'd always hoped she could get to know him better. Boldly, she then walked into Henscher's office and perched herself at his piano, her neckline loose and low so that when she bent over to touch the keys Henscher could see her breasts curving toward her just-concealed nipples. Elise's looks were more conventional in their appeal than Pammy's—a high forehead over opal-colored eyes that changed with the light, peaches and cream complexion, a small nose over full lips. Henscher was paunchy, waddling as he walked; he had a sensual mouth and a jolly, occasionally wheezing laugh. Elise had met him a few times in the past, saw mayhem in his eyes, and had stayed clear of him. When he asked her to lunch, she knew she had him.

In the commissary Henscher didn't even express sympathy for Elise's recent widowhood. His first question when they'd been seated was, “Do you swallow?” The conversation went downhill from there. Elise said she'd heard he liked to play rough. Henscher was suspicious—“Oh I don't know,” he said—until Elise reassured him that was exactly what she craved. She told him she was like a panther that wouldn't behave until she'd tasted the lash. Before lunch ended they'd made a date to spend a night together. Elise called Henscher every other day, purring the cruelties she would endure, tantalizing him with details she and Pammy had combed from the Marquis de Sade.

It was at this point I was given my instructions. I went to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and reserved a suite for one night the following week, saying I was Cyrus Henscher's assistant. I paid for the suite with money Pammy had given me. Then I went to a moving company and bought a large crate which I strapped to the roof of my Essex.

As we drove downtown on the appointed morning, Elise told me about Mossy's early days in Hollywood to distract me from our bleak errand. He hired people, he had laughingly told her, to come up to him outside premieres, or in restaurants or at parties or even on a sidewalk in front of a studio. They'd ask him for jobs, tell him he was a great producer and they'd do anything to work on his next picture. At the time he hadn't made any pictures at all. They'd beg him to look at their portfolios if they were pretending to be actors, or at least let them come and read for him. Of course, they were unemployed themselves, just down-and-outs who had washed up on the West Coast and would do anything for a couple of dollars. “Wait a minute,” the street bums would say to Mossy, “aren't you Amos Zangwill the producer?” “Why yes, actually I am,” Mossy would say, or, “Well, that's what my wife calls me.” These were the come-ons from the nobodies to the nobody that were supposed to get the attention of somebody.

A more successful gambit of Mossy's, Elise told me, was wheedling himself into the presence of stars as big as Mary Pickford and Buster Keaton. Playing on their vanity, he'd ask if he could film them at home for their private amusement. They'd let Mossy and a cameraman into their homes on weekend afternoons, and Mossy filmed them in their pools or playing with their children or their Irish setters. This meant Mossy now knew these stars and could approach them later with an actual property they might like. If they let him sell the shorts to theaters he made a little money and if they didn't at least the stars had far better home movies than they would have made themselves.

Parking a block from the Los Angeles morgue, Elise and I got ourselves into the disguises she had picked up from Jubilee's costume department—long red hair and an outrageously large hat and bosom for her, a beard and crutches for me along with a train engineer's cap. The crutches were a favor to me Pammy had thought up; they made it impossible for me to have to carry our passenger. Katinka the Red drove a rented panel truck to the morgue in return for a five hundred dollar cash contribution to the Party from Pammy. Katinka's own disguise was a nurse's uniform, also provided by Jubilee's costumers. Her name tag read Nancy Bukharin, a tribute to the Bolshevik theorist. “Let the morgue do what they will with that,” Katinka said. She had switched the license plates on the truck with those from an abandoned car she'd found in Venice.

Weeping, Elise led me into the morgue where she, sadly, knew her way around, having had to claim Joey's body there so recently. The tears, however, were not for Joey, or possibly in part they were. We were a brother and sister, Elise sobbed to the assistant supervisor at the morgue, who needed to find the body of our dear aunt. She had descended to hard times, barely eking out her living on the streets, and we had grounds for believing the poor thing might have passed on.

We were led into a vast refrigerated room where we were almost overcome by the reek of formaldehyde as we passed from slab to slab. Since we needed a cadaver with a shape and size reasonably similar to Elise's we had to view several unidentified bodies until we found the right one, a middle-aged woman ravaged, from her forlorn and sunken look of despair, less by death than by life. Elise collapsed in my arms. “Oh heavenly days, Aunt Cornelia!” she blurted through her tears.

When the morgue officials asked for our identification as we were claiming the body, Elise wept uncontrollably. “Our poor auntie, gone to glory,” she managed to sob until she was too overcome to continue. They were eager to be rid of us. “I really have to get my sister out of here,” I said to the assistant supervisor as I handed him a couple of Pammy's hundred dollar bills. By this time we had been joined by Katinka in her nurse's uniform with the name tag Nancy Bukharin, duly jotted down by the morgue receptionist. She held up Elise as I hobbled along on my crutches and the morgue attendants carried the shrouded body to Katinka's panel truck. I signed for the cadaver, giving the name Cornelia Henscher and designating myself as Brutus Henscher.