Girl of My Dreams (67 page)

Hollywood is no stranger to overdoing everything in its path. But that day, that sweltering noon in the last week of July 1934, the members of the Jubilee family did not perform the tears they shed. As for Mossy himself, he had to be helped from Stage Eight by Elena Frye and Esther Leah. His shiner, hidden behind the dark glasses, was weeping on its own, but I would give him credit for half his tears being genuine grief at the catastrophe he endured, or caused, or both.

The saying around town was that your first murder in Los Angeles was for free. Despite rumors that lived far longer than the victim, no promising suspects surfaced. No arrest was ever made.

The New York Times
reported that the passing of Palmyra Millevoix set off a wave of public mourning not seen since the death of Rudolph Valentino eight years earlier. Millevoix fan clubs sponsored memorial services around the country. Some were even held in churches, but the liveliest were in theaters, the picture palaces she had filled with her larger-than-life self that was now also larger than death.

It turned out to be a killing week. In Vienna, Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss was assassinated during a failed Nazi coup meant to take over Austria. Hitler had to wait another four years to march into Linz, his Austrian hometown, and on to Vienna. In Chicago, the bank robber, murderer, and hard times folk hero John Dillinger was killed by the FBI as he came out of a theater where he had just seen
Manhattan Melodrama
starring Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, and William Powell. Both men and women rushed to dip their handkerchiefs in Dillinger's blood for souvenirs of the bandit some believed was a Robin Hood of the Depression years.

I had to reach Millie before any radios or visitors did. Seven years were all Millie was granted to know her mother, and her mother was all she really knew. My nine years with my own mother suddenly felt opulent. I wondered if Millie had had time to build a little world of her own or if she was still so attached to her mother that this would be like the amputation of a vital organ. What could I do with her, feeling as aimless and neglected as I did? I knew I was at the end of my youth, but being only twenty-four I also knew I was at the beginning of something else, though I wouldn't have dignified it by calling it maturity. It was something larger than I was though I participated in it, something about Hollywood, about the Communists, about the country and our Great Depression, how they all fought one another yet also intersected.

A chilling possibility from the grogshop of my grief: if Pammy had lived would she have become infected by starshine, too burned even to mention me in her memoirs, sticking to fellow celebrities? Very well, I remained in love with a shadow that needed no substance. The shadow itself would reliably vanish, I already knew, like a ballerina twirling offstage, filling me with memory until the day when I become only a memory myself. So are we all, possessors of memories until we are vanished into the memories of others.

Elise Millevoix Jouet wasn't coming out to Red Woods with her own children until the next day. She held herself together until the funeral was over and then essentially collapsed into her twin griefs—for Pammy and, always, her guilt over the death of her husband, her conscience on the rack as if she'd been sentenced by Torquemada. She said she couldn't face Millie until I'd done the dirty work.

I kept my radio off as I set out because I didn't want to hear about the police following their leads, nor did I want to listen to Pammy's songs being played in the dirge of obituaries. This did no good because on a hot day the other cars had their windows down and their radios on. As I drove through the communities heading east, the Millevoix songs rang out until they seemed to be the air I was breathing. Some homes probably had radios on, but the persistence of certain songs suggested people were playing their favorite records on phonographs as they said goodbye. One house played “Dynamite,” and I remembered when she and Jolson had sung together—“There's never an erosion, It's more like an explosion When Dinah makes me feel high as the sky; She's such dynamite that I love her, Maybe Dinah might love me too, For I'd love to be her lover And I know that I'd be true.” Another house broadcast “Can Sara Wear a Pair ‘A Dungarees”—“I'll ask it sweetly, I'll go down upon my knees: Hear my prayer, Mr. McDougall, I know you're kinda frugal, But could Sara wear a pair 'a dungarees?”

A large house in San Marino was blasting forth “I'll be brokenhearted ‘till the next time we kiss,/ I'll be brokenhearted, It started when we parted, I'll be brokenhearted, like thiiiiiis.” At a mansion half a mile away a loudspeaker had been installed on the lawn and was broadcasting “I can do anything except say goodbye Since the word by itself leaves a tear in my eye, So please don't ask if you don't want me to cry, I never have found where's the good in goodbye.” Finally, a house was playing “Born Blue” and I was sure the trees themselves were drooping. It was a small home with a hedge around it in Azusa. “I'm born blue, blue, blue; That's me not you, you, you; It's always been true … that I was born blue.” Pammy herself knew her song fit its composer. For the girl of my dreams, there was never anything else she could be.

The song floated from homes on the afternoon wind. I heard “Born Blue” several more times—in Pomona, Claremont, finally in Upland itself as I approached San Antonio Heights, where Pammy lived. Lived on weekends. Had lived. “If you hear this song in a bar or a train, Put a nickel in the Wurlitzer and play it again.” I comforted myself with the sad smile that Pammy's ghost must be tired of singing “Born Blue” by now.

Half a mile from the house was a roadblock. Eight or ten cars were pulled over to the side. The roadblock was manned not by police but by two uniformed guards. I recognized the familiar logo, a starburst with Jubilee Pictures inscribed below it. One of the guards approached me and I identified myself as a writer for the studio and a friend of the family needing to get through to the house to see Miss Millevoix's daughter. The guard addressed me as if he were reading a script written for a Marine officer. “Mr. Zangwill's orders were to keep everyone away until you were inside the property, sir,” the guard said. “Fans are showing up for some kind of vigil and we were instructed not to let anyone through until you were with the daughter.”

So Mossy was muscling in even now. He wasn't doing any harm. Still, I resented his hand in creating the roadblock. I'd shortly be with the daughter.

I approached the Red Woods grounds, fronted by its row of date palms interspersed with camphor trees, which secluded the house from the road. Pammy had invited me here for the weekend and now here I was. I smelled the pungent camphor before the house was visible, and when I saw the trees I began to be nervous. The palms and camphors, which made agreeable pairs when I'd seen them before, looked uneasy, mismatched today. When I turned into the circular driveway Costanza and Millie rushed out to the front porch of the rambling old ranch house that Pammy had restored. Millie was carrying her puppy, Cordell, with his enormous paws on his small quivering body. How was I going to do this? What could Millie know? Costanza had assured me radios had been put in closets all over the house so Millie would not hear any news at all, much less stations devoting their entire programming to her mother.

As I pulled up in front of the porch Costanza was already talking to me. She was like an overfilled balloon ready to burst. “Mr. Owen, thank God, I'm so glad, I don't know how long –” and she pointed to the edge of the driveway where, though I hadn't noticed as I drove in, a photographer was camped, waiting for a picture of Millie.

“Uncle Owen,” Millie said, “what took you so long? We've been waiting for you all day. Will you tell me a story?”

Costanza had evidently continued to hold herself together since I'd last spoken to her on the phone. Now, as she saw me and knew what I had to tell Millie, her face was suddenly, though still silently, a stream of tears. I nodded at her and asked Millie to take me up to her room. Costanza ran to the kitchen and I heard her turn the water on in the sink to hide her bawling as I swept Millie into my arms and started to carry her up the stairs. “Oh, Uncle Owen, don't be silly,” she said, “I can beat you upstairs any day.” She ran and I followed. Behind me Cordell struggled stair by stair.

Millie's room had stars on the ceiling, a light shade of sky blue on the upper portion of the wall, a darker watery blue on the lower portion. On the wall was a large blown-up photograph of Pammy and Millie as they ran along a beach toward the camera. An eager pair, mirroring each other, all laughter, hair blown on their faces. We sat on Millie's bed, Cordell at her feet. For a moment each of us looked at the other, and I could hear the seconds of Millie's innocence ticking down. I took a deep breath and for some reason she did the same. “Millie honey,” I said, “I have to say something I'd give the world not to tell you.”

“Hush,” she said as she reached up and put her small hand over my mouth. “Let's sing.”

34

Aftermath

Confounding my certainties, the General Strike in San Francisco not only happened but more or less succeeded, “more or less” being the operative phrase. No weapons, no more furious demonstrations, no violence. For most, it was a cheerful mutiny. Harry Bridges and the other labor leaders knew they could not beat machine guns and bayonets. Their weapons were numbers. By the thousands, men and women all over San Francisco and Oakland simply left their jobs, a gesture of bravery, perhaps bravado, at a time when over twenty percent of the workforce had no jobs at all. At the final strike vote Bridges announced, “The ayes have it and the nos know it.” In addition to the dockworkers, seventy-eight other unions joined the walkout. The General Strike was led by the Teamsters, who had earlier opposed it, and almost all factories and businesses in the Bay Area, even restaurants, were shut down. Some shops hung signs in their windows: “Closed Till the Boys Win.” “We're Out as Long as You're Out.”

The first woman ever to hold a Cabinet post, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, telegraphed President Roosevelt who, in that irony Bridges had aptly noted, was taking a cruise while the seamen and longshoremen were on strike. OFFICERS OF THE UNIONS, Perkins wired, HAVE BEEN SWEPT OFF THEIR FEET BY THE STRENGTH OF THE RANK AND FILE MOVEMENT STOP THERE IS UNUSUAL MASS MOVEMENT UNUSUAL SOLIDARITY AND UNITY STOP THERE HAS BEEN RELATIVELY LITTLE DISORDER UNTIL THE POLICE WERE PUT ON THE DOCKS WITH ORDERS TO SHOOT IF NECESSARY STOP THE SITUATION IS SERIOUS BUT NOT YET HOPELESS STOP.

When Secretary of State Cordell Hull (of Pammy's jingle and Millie's puppy) and Attorney General Homer Cummings advised that the U.S. Army be mobilized to put down the strike, Perkins warned that it would be unwise for the Roosevelt administration to start shooting it out with working people, especially working people who were only exercising their rights. She said the General Strike was not led by the Communists, who were loudmouthed but not in control, any more than by the traditional union leaders, who had pretty much been discarded. For his part FDR counseled from shipboard that he'd like to see arbitration, which had already failed to win support from either side. “A lot of people completely lost their heads,” he later recalled, “and telegraphed me that I should sail into San Francisco Bay, all flags flying and guns double-shotted, and end the strike.” He did nothing. Perhaps more presidents should take more vacations; Roosevelt continued his cruise and let the conflict run its course.

The course, in the event, was a short one. With the Bay Area approaching a crisis as the basic provisions of food and gasoline were cut off, the mass walkout of over one hundred thousand men and women lasted only four hot July days. As the General Strike went into its second and third days, panic ruled the business districts. In contrast, Mike Quin wrote me gleefully, a holiday spirit prevailed in working-class neighborhoods. “Like the workers themselves,” Quin said, “the owners know perfectly well no revolution is coming, but they use revolutionary rumors as a strategy to scare the middle class.” He couldn't finish his thought without landing an uppercut to my jaw, to everyone in the picture business: “You show good people as well dressed and groomed and polite with clean shirts on, the better sort; rough features and soiled clothes are signs of the underworld and the lower classes, not people you'd want to associate with. Workers and people who look like workers, that's who the movies paint into crime scenes.”

The Teamsters, who began the General Strike, broke it, leaving Longshoremen in the lurch, and then the Longshoremen went back to work, leaving the Seamen on dry land. Quickly, all the unions followed the Teamsters and returned to their jobs. The solidarity that Harry Bridges wanted vanished even from his own union (he had opposed going back to work), and it appeared, as San Francisco caught its breath again, that the owners had won.

Yet the strike changed the labor scene. The solidarity was gone, but the fear remained, and this time the fear belonged to the owners. If this happened once, they understood, it could happen again. At another mass meeting in Dreamland—one of many during the next few weeks—federal, municipal, and union officials were all shouted down when they urged settlements favoring the dock and shipowners. A chant of “We Want Bridges!” went up throughout the auditorium until Bridges took the stage and said all workers had nothing to lose by standing firm until their demands were met.

When the inevitable arbitration—proposed by FDR—was over, the longshoremen won almost everything they had struck for. Wages rose, hours declined, overtime pay became standard, working conditions improved. Most importantly, the company union on the docks was gone, and the International Longshoreman's Association became the sole bargaining entity for the dockworkers. Daily hiring was put under the nominal control of both the employers and the union, but since the dispatcher had to be from the union, only union members were dispatched. The power of the longshoremen, and the authority of Harry Bridges, remained solid for decades.