Girl of My Dreams (64 page)

33

Bumblebee

Pammy was welcomed home venomously in Louella's column: “Good for Mossy Zangwill over at Jubilee if he refuses to reinstate the oh-so-holier-than-thou Palmyra Millevoix who is importing not merely her European elegance but also an alien ideology. Radio stations should stop playing her songs the way Zangwill, once her champion and then some, has suspended her from the picture she walked out on. My spies tell me he is threatening to cancel her contract. If she doesn't mend her ways, and fast, this non-citizen should be deported, and faster.”

But Louella didn't run Jubilee. To my surprise Pammy plunged back into work at the studio, where Mossy immediately voided her suspension. He needed her; it was that simple. When I asked her why she was returning to the studio she said, “What good am I on the outside?” To the studio it was as if she'd had a fever that had receded and her temperature was now normal again. Mossy assured Pammy that the Mexican seamstresses had been given fifty percent raises with time and a half for overtime; he claimed he hadn't known how little they were being paid before.

Nils Maynard had replaced Wick Fairless, the director Pammy hated, with Nils Maynard, and a quick rewrite of the script had given her a far stronger character.
Love Is for Strangers
now had Pammy leaving her unfaithful husband and subsequently taking up with a horse breeder, who in the earlier version had been only a friend of the philandering husband's. Pammy's character had a baby by the ne'er-do-well husband, causing her mother, played by Ethel Barrymore at her haughtiest, to refuse to see her grandchild and break off all contact with her daughter. Things went swiftly on the set, Pammy's favorite, Stage Eight, which, she maintained, had the best acoustics on the lot.

I myself was put on the rewrite of a dud called
Firebrand
, their way of letting me know I was on probation. A young couple has bought their first home—the husband a fireman, the wife a bookkeeper in a clothing store. You know the rest: one evening the owner of the store, facing bankruptcy and assuming everyone has gone home, starts a fire to burn the store down so he can collect the insurance. The conscientious wife is still in the store going over sales records. By the time the fire trucks arrive the place is ablaze. The fireman fails to save his wife but does find evidence of arson. Brokenhearted, he tells the police who take forever to trace the fire to the owner. Meanwhile, the insurance company is tracking down all suspects and their investigator is a woman who, of course, falls for the fireman in his grief. Makes friends with his two adorable motherless youngsters. Nothing here but soapsuds, yet it was my back-in-the-fold assignment, and my fingers flew at the keys of my Royal, famished crows pecking for corn. The main change I made was to have the woman investigator be the daughter of the guilty store owner, which meant that eventually she'd have to choose between loyalty to her father and to the fireman who wants revenge. I was briskly replaced by the reliably arch Tutor Beedleman who didn't care about the romance but spruced up the plot so that the fireman had a criminal record of his own, a shady past he was trying to escape. And so on.

Besides being the ultimate company towns, Hollywood and Washington have one further attribute in common that keeps everyone in either place from relaxing. They're always trying to figure out what the rest of the country wants. More than anything else, it was the worry about whether his hunches would find audiences that kept Mossy as anti-union as he was. He wanted everyone on the lot to have the same vision he did: lines around the block in Schenectady. That left no time for labor disputes.

But Pammy had taken her secular vows, and San Francisco only confirmed them. Back at work on a picture, she hadn't forgotten the principles behind the dockworkers' strike. Anyone who was not an owner was by definition being exploited, from which it followed that owners were exploiters. Even if Mossy didn't entirely own Jubilee because of his need for the New York bankers, he was New York's West Coast proconsul and held a major portion of Jubilee stock. What Pammy wanted was to make Jubilee Pictures a model for the rest of Hollywood, a studio fully organized by unions.

She was hardly alone. Each craft had representatives who wanted the picture business to be part of the labor movement. Yeatsman a bit reluctantly led the writers—with the Screen Writers Guild still in its infancy, Mossy predictably supported their company union rivals, the Screen Playwrights. For all his bluster, Largo Buchalter was driving the interested directors. Set designers and decorators were restless. Cameramen were grumbling about overtime. Pammy was simply the most visible among the actors favoring a union. Like her sister Elise among the decorators, Pammy wanted to get all the crafts together, and after we returned from San Francisco she asked me who she ought to speak to among the carpenters.

To my eternal shame, I told her I'd heard that Hop Daigle, the jelly-eyed carpenter, had emerged as the leader among the set builders. She and Yeatsman had a private meeting with Daigle off the lot. They decided to hold a rally outside the Jubilee gates and announce plans to organize the studio. Then they had a second meeting with craft representatives—film editors, sound engineers, makeup artists, and stuntmen.

The day after the second meeting Willie Bioff, the labor fixer—racketeer, go-between, shakedown artist, they all fit—came to see Mossy again with, of course, Hop Daigle. I had no idea. When Elena Frye told me about this later, I knew I shouldered lasting responsibility and would never know how much. Daigle, whose jelly eye had turned whitish according to Elena, told them of the plans to organize Jubilee as essentially a union shop with many guilds representing the various crafts. Rumblings at the other studios were similar. It was primitive, hardly a threat to capitalist enterprise, nothing like the broad-based unions that were out to organize entire industries. But it was enough to make the Hollywood titans first shudder and then become furious. The rumor at Fox was that Darryl Zanuck threatened to mount a machine gun on a parapet above the studio gates and have anyone mowed down who marched outside with a picket sign.

Up north, Harry Bridges's creed was to find out what the rank and file, as he always called longshoremen, wanted to do and then help them do it, from the bottom up. Willie Bioff, as he'd done when Jubilee's sets were being trashed, would find out how much he could extort from the bosses, then pass as little of the boodle as possible to the workers, from the top down, keeping the rest for himself and his mob handlers. I doubt Bridges and Bioff ever met, but if they did they couldn't have understood one another's language. Elena Frye told me that Willie Bioff, smiling and joking throughout the meeting, had started at a hundred thousand dollars with Mossy, promising labor peace if his price was met, and had settled for thirty-five. Hop Daigle nodded his agreement, the jellied eye gone milky for the occasion, and Mossy quickly looked away.

The night before the rally at Jubilee I went to dinner at Pammy's house. Millie at last had a real dog, which she'd delightedly named Cordell. Cordell was beloved in different ways by each of his mistresses—Millie, Costanza, and Pammy. Millie asked me if I could write a screamplay about her and Cordell. The puppy, an Airedale terrier, could still barely stand so Millie carried it. She'd taken the name from her mother's jingle on the secretary of state, who the seven-year-old Millie hadn't heard of. She seldom sang it the same way twice. “I'm in love with Cordell Hull, He treats me nice though he's awfully dull.” Sometimes, trying out a new word, Millie would do the second line as “But I have to admit he's indubitably dull,” and in an irritable mood she'd sing, “When he's mean I want to bash his skull.” Cordell the dog, unlike his stolid namesake, was as lively and jumpy as his puppy legs would let him be, but when he was swooped into Millie's arms he subsided into a quick cuddle.

Pammy and I scarcely had eye contact at dinner. In the way a precocious child can dominate an occasion, the conversation wound around Millie, Cordell, her school, or something she hoped to do. The three of us chewed our lamb chops in unison, each new subject announced by Millie, and we were not a family.

Before Costanza took her upstairs, Millie asked me for a story. I told her that in my story there would be a fairy godmother and a mean mother. “Oh good,” she said, “a really mean mother.” I set off, not knowing where I was headed, and had looked away from Millie to her mother when Millie asked me to describe the fairy godmother. “She was so pretty,” I said, “that she looked like a sunny morning in a golden meadow. She had gossamer eyebrows below her wide forehead lined with all the thinking she did, and the eyebrows slanted down a little on the sides giving her hazel eyes perhaps a tiny glimmer of sadness, but it was only the sadness that there were too many more children to help than she had time to get to, so whenever she helped a child her eyes became a little less sad. At the tip of her nose her nostrils widened slightly giving her the look of wanting something she didn't quite have, or once had but didn't have anymore.”

“A fairy godfather, right?” said Millie. “That's what she wanted.” “Maybe,” I said, “but maybe it was only she still had so much to do. Her smile was the other thing children always noticed because it was a little one-sided on the left where her lips turned up more than on the right. And again, this was because she hadn't quite helped enough children yet and when she finally finished helping all the children who needed her she was going to have a full smile on both sides of her mouth.”

“Uncle Owen, what's gossamer eyebrows?”

“Oh, thin wispy little things, eyebrows you almost couldn't see because they were honey-colored and blended right in with her thoughtful forehead. Anyway, here's what happened—there was a little girl who had the meanest mother in the world.” “That's impossible,” Millie interrupted, warming to the tale, “my mother is the meanest mother because she won't let me stay up late and she spends too much time at the studio and isn't home for dinner enough and sometimes she stays away almost a week in San Francisco.” “Well, okay, that's pretty mean, but this mother was even
named
Meanie. Mrs. Meanie. The mean thing she did one night was to not let her daughter Lily have dessert, no dessert at all even though Lily had cleaned her plate, Brussels sprouts and bony fish which she hated, but Mrs. Meanie had promised Lily a special treat for dessert if she finished everything on her plate.”

“Wait a minute, Lily is her name?” Millie said. “Why not Barbara or Genevieve?”

“She looked a little like you so her name sounds like yours, but she had an even meaner mother. Listen to what Mrs. Meanie did to Lily when Lily thought she was about to get dessert. Mrs. Meanie tied her daughter to a chair in the kitchen while she went and got ice cream, peppermint stick ice cream which was her daughter Lily's favorite.”—“It's my favorite too Uncle Owen and you know it!” Millie squealed.—“But it was Lily's favorite and she loved chocolate cake with it, which Mrs. Meanie had baked specially because just the smell of it would drive Lily crazy.”

“So she wasn't that mean after all. She gave Lily the dessert?”

“Of course not. Mrs. Meanie brought out the chocolate cake and peppermint stick ice cream and then she, Mrs. Meanie, proceeded to eat it very slowly, spoonful by delicious spoonful, right in front of Lily who was tied up begging for a bite. ‘Please, please!' Lily said, ‘just one little bite of the cake and ice cream.' But Mrs. Meanie looked at her and said so slowly that the word lasted a long time, ‘Noooooooooooo.' Lily cried and was put to bed with no dessert, and that's when the fairy godmother with the gossamer eyebrows and ever so slightly one-sided smile came in her window carrying a huge slice of chocolate cake and four scoops of peppermint ice cream.”

“Please,” Pammy said, “could we hold it to two?” “No!” Millie said, “I want Lily to have four!” “Yes,” I said, “it was four scoops because she had to have extra scoops to make up for all the times her mean mother Mrs. Meanie hadn't allowed her to eat any dessert at all. Her fairy godmother promised she'd be back whenever her mean mother was at her meanest. So Lily went to bed happy and slept soundly with the most disobediently adventurous dreams.”

Millie gave me a first hug. I glimpsed the future.

When she had kissed Millie good night, Pammy told me about Mossy's promise that the studio seamstresses would get fifty percent raises. “I congratulated one of them who brought a gown to my bungalow. She said the raises were twenty percent and not a penny extra for overtime.
Bâtard!
Power, power, power is all he craves! Everything else, every
one
else, is just useful. Power, that's the woman he loves.”

Her face was like iron. I wondered if you could take a picture of such a face, of that mood.

I had never seen her so beautiful as when she gazed at Millie, nor so afflicted as when she described Mossy and the seamstresses. In San Francisco she had been in a rage at injustice; now the grievance was intensified by betrayal and lying. And by its source. But then the anger left her as suddenly as it had arrived and she looked, simply and guilelessly, as Mike Quin had described the marchers on Market Street, resolved. “It's done,” she said, “or will be shortly.”

It was time for me to go, past time. “Good luck tomorrow,” I said, and she said I should come to her bungalow after the rally so we could make plans for the weekend. “You can tell by the hug from my little seductress that she wants you at Red Woods too, okay?” As I was leaving, kissless, almost out the door, she said, “Now give me, sweet Ownie, the TK.” “TK?” I asked. “You know,” she said, “the tooth kiss we accidentally had in my bungalow at the studio that first day.”

First day? I thought driving home. She remembered. Touching. Yet how many men has Millie called Uncle? Not only wouldn't I ask, I didn't want to know. I'm here now, I told myself, and I'll stay here inside this enchantment until the weekend or the end of time, whichever comes first.