Girl of My Dreams (68 page)

Defiantly, the longshoremen's newspaper printed a declaration: “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” The foregoing is not, the newspaper went on to point out, an instruction from Moscow. It is a quotation from Abraham Lincoln.

Union fever was rising in Hollywood too. I joined the Screen Writers Guild, barely out of the larva stage, the precursor of the other talent guilds. At Jubilee, even the producers were talking about forming a guild until Yeatsman went to them and said, “You blind bats—what the hell do you think a studio is, or the Motion Picture Academy itself for Christ's sake, if not a producer's association?”

Mossy assigned Nils Matheus Maynard to direct the love story, if it was that, of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The executives reasoned that Nils's hemophilia would enhance his sensitivity to the bleeding disease that affected Victoria's own family. The studio also announced it would produce the biography of its fallen star. The picture was to be called
Crusading Angel
and would be written by Jamie McPhatter, Sylvia Solomon's bombastic heavy drinking former escort, who had never known Pammy but who had come up with the title. I vowed to sabotage this project and told myself it would be for Millie's sake. McPhatter was halfway through the first draft when one night I wrote him an anonymous memo that his pages reeked of maudlin insincerity masking his reactionary contempt for his subject. Whether because of my nastiness—I hadn't seen a word he'd written—or because Comfort O'Hollie purposely mangled his scenes as she typed them, McPhatter stayed drunk for the next week and then was taken off the script. The title was changed, fresh writers were put on the story, but the project was allowed to dwindle before anything serious was done about it. Who, for instance, would expose herself to the darts that would be aimed at any actress presuming to impersonate Pammy?

In the weeks following Pammy's death I could barely function. Memory was still too sharp a pain to allow the thought to surface that most people went their whole lives without knowing Palmyra Millevoix while I—and selected others I chose to ignore—had been brushed by the wand of a fairy godmother who granted the wish I had never dared to wish. And then snatched it away. I felt like a painter who contrived to put a singular wash over his canvas that would, years later, bring out the colors even more vividly than when he first applied them. Instead of fading, the pigments became stronger, burned more brightly, than they had even in the moment. The only lasting solace came to me decades later, after the war, with the relief that she had not had to endure the frightful Hollywood blacklist, the years of betrayal and ostracism and cowardice.

Love Is for Strangers
, the picture Pammy was making when she died, was near enough to completion that Mossy wanted it released and knew Millevoix fans would flock to it. The principal scene that Pammy hadn't lived to film was the reunion with her mother when the latter is enduring her fatal illness. Pammy's entrance to the sickroom had already been shot. The rest of the scene plays in close-ups of Ethel Barrymore and medium shots of Pammy's stand-in from behind looking at Ethel, whose earlier hauteur has given way to apologetic humility. Pammy's lines were shortened to a simple, “It's all right, Mother, it's all right,” played over the back of the stand-in's head. The words were borrowed from an earlier picture where she had been Marie Dressler's daughter and Marie had accidentally poisoned the family dog. Nils retrieved a shot from a third picture, a scene where Pammy had been about to kiss Trent Amberlyn and the shot had been over Trent's shoulder. Nils had this blown up to eliminate Trent and create a close-up of Pammy, then matted it into the room where Pammy was visiting Ethel. The way the shot emerges, instead of expectantly awaiting a kiss from the gay actor Pammy now looks eager for reconciliation with her mother. For the final shot of the scene, Ethel insists on getting out of bed and kneels to bury her head in the stand-in's lap, eternally sorry for having been such an antiquated fool. The scene, and the picture, ends when she raises her head and says to Pammy, “Now when can I see my grandchild?”

The slight solace that did come to me within months was a weak, bitter tea. I found myself at Jubilee one morning in the fall, the grim weeks of the Santa Ana wind when the dry air blasts everything in its path. Against the wind's moan, I was in Mossy's office with a clutch of others having a story conference. I had come to be soothed by these meetings, whose levity opposed my grief; I could say anything and get away with it without paying much attention because no one was paying much attention to me. Haunting the story conferences of other writers who were glad to have someone along to dodge barbs with, I was protected from being alone in my office with nothing to do, from direct images of Pammy and her laughter, the way she sounded, her half smile, and always the hole that sprung in her forehead. “Let's have Teresa pregnant then, already pregnant when she steps off the train even if we don't know it yet,” Yeatsman was saying. “Then when she meets Trent, we know she's been through hell and he has to do some thinking himself. He's always too goddamned naïve if you ask me, with that knowing but basically ignorant grin. It's time Trent Amberlyn grew up.”

A stunned silence. I'd only half-heard Yeatsman. Should I try to rescue him or was Mossy about to take up the idea? “Very funny, Yancey,” Mossy at last chipped in mirthlessly. “The Hays Office let a woman unbenefitted by clergy just suddenly be knocked up, walk pregnant right into a movie? Let's be serious.”

The sex scandals of the Twenties having hobbled Hollywood, the Hays Office was the rigid morals police. Yet Yancey was on the right track. I came to life, in my fashion. “No, no, the woman had a husband,” I offered, “and the guy climbed on the top of the train to rescue a hobo who'd gotten stuck up there. It was their honeymoon. He fell off, widowing her within a week of their wedding. Now she can be pregnant.”

“You're coming out of your coma,” Mossy said. “Thanks, pal,” Yeatsman said.

That's right, I thought. It's high time Trent Amberlyn grew up.

I was put to work on the screenplay of
Lorna Doone
, the English adventure tale of warring clans and ultimately triumphant romance. At last: I could write the story of a man who actually saves the woman he loves even though she does get shot. That buoyed me. It wasn't my story—in Hollywood you don't write your own story—but it was a reclamation project all the same.

I collect and recollect. Especially in Hollywood, memory is a function of myth, a product of whoever has the strongest fantasy of the moment, the most persistent dream. Dreams don't only matter; they are matter. In a climate of exaggeration, where within weeks we all come to believe our own superlatives, who could say which were, pardon me,
really true
, and which mere figments? What if I am the undetected guest at the banquet of life? Nothing more than a speck in a landscape by Watteau. A derivative figure with its uses in the painting, drawing the eye to significance, perspective, the vastness of everything else, how sublime it all is in comparison with the speck.

Yancey cheered me, or tried to, one day when he shot a question at me direct from Yeats, a query both soothing and unanswerable: “‘Does the imagination dwell the most On a woman won or a woman lost?'”

He had me there.

Years later, when Yeatsman was questioned about Gloriana Flower's Party party, where he had contributed a thousand dollars, he refused to say anything to his inquisitors beyond a passage from his sage: “‘O but we dreamed to mend Whatever mischief seemed To afflict mankind, but now That winds of winter blow Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.'” They cited him for contempt.

When he emerged from the blacklist, Yancey persevered in Hollywood. His later gloom—I wouldn't call it tragedy—was that his originals seldom got made and weren't very successful. His regret was that he neither went home, as he called it, to novels and plays nor did he become a director, which would have enabled him to guide his pages onto the screen. His adaptations continued to pay him handsomely, and he was too gracious to allow self-contempt, the occupational hazard of screenwriters, to leak out. He was still in good form on his eightieth birthday, quoting the master as always: “‘Did all old men and women, rich and poor, Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door, Whether in public or in secret, rage As I do now against old age?'” When he was finally installed at Forest Lawn a few years back, a cheeky young writer, jealous of Yeatsman's status, said in the commissary after Yancey's sound stage memorial service that his headstone should bear the Yeats quote, “‘The best lack all conviction.'” Mossy, no longer head of the studio but still its biggest stockholder and on hand that day for Yancey's service, had the writer fired on the spot.

Gloriana Flower's party took its toll on others as well. When political investigations strafed Hollywood Edward G. Robinson was accused, twenty years later, of having had the temerity or bad judgment to attend Gloriana's gathering. To this charge he replied both sheepishly and defiantly. He said he'd been naïve, on the one hand, and that on the other hand it was nobody's business but his own where he went and what he did. Sylvia Solomon, my obliging date at the party, put her own situation succinctly after being named by, of all people, Mitch Altschuler, perhaps the most passionate Communist any of us knew. “Why was I a Communist?” she repeated the Congressional investigator's question. “Well, since the Communists were the only people standing up for what I believed in against the terrifying inequality and prejudice and economic rapaciousness in America, it seemed silly not to be one of them.” She was duly blacklisted. As for the two Communist recruiters at Gloriana's house, Greta Kimple and Mort Leech, they were
agents provocateurs
. When they finished seducing, in their curious way, new Party members, they shed their Red masks to reveal that their true faces were those of the FBI. They turned in everyone they'd ever turned, including Kimple's brother and Leech's wife, whom he promptly divorced. Then Greta Kimple and Mort Leech married.

When the inquisition came for me, small potatoes, I was a step ahead of it. I'd left Hollywood for Rome and buried myself in spaghetti Westerns until the storm blew over.

Hindsight, reputed to be twenty-twenty by social ophthalmologists, is actually muddied by everything that happened between the event and whatever present we choose for our judgment platform. The Communist functionaries Zinoviev and Kamenev, for instance, specified by Mitch Altschuler as Jews Stalin valued in his inner circle, were purged and executed in 1936. Mitch scoffed at the possibility that Hitler would kill all five hundred thousand Jews in Germany; Hitler, of course, was only clearing his throat when he reached the half million mark in dead Jews. Having named all the Red names he could think of for the House Un-American Activities Committee, Mitch managed to remain employed in Hollywood, but he lost his furious wife and most of his friends. “I saw the light when the Korean War started and I knew my own country was fighting the Communists,” Mitch told the Committee, though in fact he had signed a protest against the war right after it began in 1950.

For labor racketeering and extortion Willie Bioff was eventually sentenced to ten years in prison. Alcatraz did not suit his Hollywood tastes, and he soon asked to testify against his former confederates. Five of them were convicted, and Bioff was paroled. A dozen years later, after moving to Arizona and changing his name to Bill Nelson, becoming friends with Barry Goldwater and going into business with the senator's nephew, Bioff started his pickup one morning and the explosion blew his body parts twenty-five feet from the wreckage. Hollywood treated its informers with the alternating current of professional rehabilitation and social ostracism; the mob's solution was simpler.

In San Francisco, the anniversary of Bloody Thursday was marked for many years by a memorial to martyrs when longshoremen stopped work in honor of Nick Bordoise and Howard Sperry. Harry Bridges became an institution. Mike Quin wrote his own account of the dockworkers' strike but died before it was published.

Time is a controlling force here, a character enacting its own will. No good reason exists for it to go forward always and not turn around the way other characters do, or even travel in a curve endlessly encircling itself. If time is arbitrary and indivisible, as physicists come closer each year to believing, Pammy is still singing and Yancey still quoting, or in another sphere they have not yet begun. Pammy will always be available melodically regardless of the state of recording technology. We may as easily find Mossy Zangwill dressing, conscientiously outfitting himself in front of his wife or a mistress as we might discover Achilles girding himself for battle. It is not purely a sadistic joke, though the slimeball means it that way, when my agent tells me it is part of Hollywood's doctrinal minutiae that my own future is behind me. So it has been always.

The time is coming when we will venture both into what we decide is the known past as well as the unknown future. Then we will know whether Palmyra Millevoix studied music formally—I never asked her—or just let it flow from her, whether she knew she was going to die, whether she loved me or merely flung her charms in my direction for the nonce to amuse herself.

Dr. Pogorzelski wondered if we are dreaming or dreamed. I knew the answer finally. We are encased within our own dream, dreamers and dreamed both. An actor is only someone performing in someone else's dream. When Pammy dies she is no longer dreaming but instantly becomes, forever, anyone else's dream. The dream within the dream, ect ect ect as Mossy would put it. You dream of a prince who dreams of a princess who dreams of a bear who dreams of a seal who dreams of a queen who dreams of you.