Girl of My Dreams (69 page)
Authors: Peter Davis
In the parallel universe where antimatter presides, there are no films but anti-films. These are the movies we writers write that never get made. I have my name on quite a few of these, some starring such luminaries as Spencer Tracy and Olivia de Havilland, others stocked with unknowns I thought would be right for my screenplays. There are even anti-movies of movies that did get made but with other casts.
Casablanca
not with Bogart and Bergman but with the benign Fred MacMurray or earnest Ty Power and the no-nonsense Maureen O'Hara or Loretta Young. Can't you see MacMurray or Ronald Reagan or Robert Montgomery wrinkling their sincere brows to say “I was misinformed” when told the waters are nowhere near Casablanca, or later, “We'll always have Paris”? And Loretta Young, who would never acknowledge having had a love child (as they were called then) with Clark Gable in real life, how about her trying to say throatily, “I wish I didn't love you so much,” or “Kiss me, kiss me as if it were the last time”? Tinny? Can we say Palmyra Millevoix continues to sing in this parallel universe, and does her unconscious exist there too? I don't believe in ghosts, but what exists exists.
Millie Millevoix moved in with her Aunt Elise and her cousins. I looked in on her and she was doing all right, a new school in the fall and her puppy Cordell embraced into the new family as its only male figure. Millie didn't ask me to tell stories anymore.
The police did detain a few suspects but only for questioning. They had no real evidence. Anyone could have done it. People have asked me whether Pammy would have been killed if she hadn't gone to San Francisco and been inspired, or fooled, or inoculated into believing the waterfront strike could be exported, transposed, down the coast to a Hollywood studio. Pammy was hardly ignorant of the differences between dockworkers and filmmakers. She was excited by the possibilities of steering Hollywood, such a company town, toward a condition where the distribution of wealth and power was more equitable. She would, I imagine, have cheered the breakup of the old studio system that took place after the war, and she would also, I further imagine, have been appalled at the power that fell, as a result of the breakup, into the hands of prima-donna actors and autocratic directors. But I don't know. Perhaps she'd have become a prima donna herself.
The course of Palmyra Millevoix, viewed from the twinkling interval when left was right and right was wrong, or from the year she served in the blood bank during the First World War until she made tourniquets for the San Francisco strikers and mounted the platform outside Jubilee Pictures, has the arc and thrust of an appointed curve. If she could speak to us from her crypt at Forest Lawn, I have no doubt she would say, “What happened to me signifies nothing, only destiny. We make our choices and our choices, in their sweet turn, make us. Someone please watch over Millie.”
Years later a French director trying his luck in Hollywood told me he had glimpsed Pammy once, in solitude, in the early Twenties, on a promenade outside a dance at Cap d'Antibes. The Eden-Roc, vanilla cream marble, and the lordly look of statuary, facing off against the shadowy Mediterranean. He said she was smiling to herself and there was a small roar from the sea as she walked slowly toward the balustrade and the hotel glided backward. He didn't dare disturb her. I see her present in his wistful sketch, the way she inhabited her diaphanous ballgown, in heartbreaking profile, looking out over the terraced gardens leading down to the blue, dark water, spinning her web whether anyone watched or not, everything yet to come.
Author's Note
My primary source for this novel was growing up in Hollywood, the son of screenwriters, in the decades following Owen Jant's coming of age in the 1930s. The time before my time drew me to itself like a Venus flytrap I couldn't escape, a black hole I desperately wanted to shine some light into. Additionally, my shelves hold more than sixty books on one or another aspect of motion pictures, the Great Depression, the San Francisco dockworkers' strike, the American Communist Party, popular songs, magic, and hemophilia.
A few books seemed to become, along with my own background, part of my DNA.
An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood
by Neal Gabler, and
City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s
by Otto Friedrich are both enriching. Though my imagination flew back to the 1930s, specifically a few heady months in 1934, Friedrich couldn't resist taking informative backward glances to see what went on earlier that made the Forties what they became. Likewise, Gabler's superb portrait of Hollywood was not restricted to what Jews themselves contributed.
The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley contains almost numberless oral histories and accounts of the dockworkers' strike in San Francisco. The two books I found particularly helpful are
Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s
by Bruce Nelson, and
The Big Strike
by Mike Quin, published after his death. I was using it for research when one day Quin marched right out of his own book and into my story.
One fictional character in
Girl of My Dreams
is also not original. Bruno Leonard, the professor from New York who harangues the faithful at Gloriana Flower's party, was first a character in
The Unpossessed
by Tess Slesinger, a novel published in 1934. My justification for this is I think it's okay to steal from your own mother.
Acknowledgments
Authors traditionally thank immediate family members last. Get the better half into this even if it feels like an afterthought. I prefer first coming first. Without the critical eye, perseverance, advice, and patience of my wife, Alicia Anstead, a writer and editor herself, this novel would not exist in anything like its present form. My daughter, Tonia Davis, a studio executive, pored over an early draft as if she were Sherlock Holmes sleuthing a misdeed. While she may not have solved the crime, she certainly humbled the criminal.
I am grateful to others who read versions or portions of the novel. Sally Arteseros provided useful editorial help on an early draft. Additionally, Dr. Henry Kandler, Andrea Pitzer, John Mankiewicz, Jeffrey Lewis, Professor Christie McDonald, and Elizabeth Murphy all gave beneficial advice, criticism, and suggestions.
Laura Starrett has copy-edited with an admirable attentiveness to detail.
I very much appreciate Open Road's having become the highway for
Girl of My Dreams.
My agent, Julia Lord, has seen this novel through many drafts and revisions; she has my lasting gratitude along with my hopes that her other authors don't take so long.
About the Author
Peter Davis is an acclaimed author and filmmaker whose writing has won praise from Graham Greene, John Irving, Robert Stone, and William Styron. He covered the war in Iraq for the
Nation
and was a contributing editor for
Esquire
. He spent eighteen months traveling among the poorest Americans for
If You Came This Way
, the title of which is from a poem by T. S. Eliot. Davis's films have won many prizes, and he received an Academy Award for his documentary on the Vietnam War,
Hearts and Minds
.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Peter Davis
Cover design by Neil Alexander Heacox
Distributed by Open Road Distribution
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
