Falling From Horses (29 page)

This seemed to amuse him. He took the script, glanced at it, dropped it back on the desk. Then he adjusted his seat and said, “I hear you want to be a writer.”

She hadn't made this a secret—she had told Marion as much when she was first hired. “I have some stories I've been sending out,” she said. She didn't tell him she had brought her Texas Ranger script into the office for one of the other girls to read and report on but had heard nothing about it afterward.

She hoped he'd offer to take a look at one of her stories himself, but instead he pushed out his thick lips like he'd tasted something bitter. “Waste of time. A screenplay done on spec is a sign of weakness. You're letting everybody know you're too young and green to land a contract. Or a failing writer trying to hold on.”

She knew too little about it to argue, but this was Lily. She frowned and argued anyway, because his tone provoked her. “A good script should rise to the top of the pile, no matter if it's on spec.”

He made a slight scoffing sound and shrugged—her opinion was nothing to him. “A woman can make it as a writer in this business, but she needs to get her foot in the door first. You want to get on as a writer, you ought to find somebody else's piece-of-crap script, polish it up, and show it to whoever heads up the writers. Show him you can put lipstick on any damn thing—that'd be one way to get in the door.” He smiled slightly, stood, and strolled away. But then he stopped at another girl's desk, a girl named Elaine, and leaned in close, speaking too softly for anyone to overhear. Elaine's hair was blond, she wore bright lipstick and skirts that showed off her legs.

He might not have been serious, Lily knew, but she took home the Crime Doesn't Pay—it was badly written, but the plot had promise—and stayed up all night in the typewriter room at the Studio Club, rewriting the whole thing. She brought the old version and the freshly typed pages back to the office in a paper folder, and when Lampman walked by her desk again she held it out to him. “I heard you're the one who heads up the writers,” she said.

He laughed, took the folder from her, and went away without saying whether he would read it. But he brought it back the next day, threw it loosely into her lap, and sat again with his hip resting on the corner of her desk. “It ain't great, but it's pretty good,” he said—out of the corner of his mouth, like George Brent in
Front Page Woman.
He smiled briefly, then leaned back and looked around the room as if he had lost interest in her. It was half a minute before he looked down at her again. “I told Marion I'm giving you a try as a junior writer. If it doesn't work out, you'll land back here. Tomorrow, come over to the writers' building and I'll give you some other piece-of-crap thing to start on.” He leaned in and touched his knuckles lightly against her chin. “Good girl,” he said.

In the morning, when she tapped on the door of his office, he yelled out something that could have been an offer to enter. He was reading a sheaf of manuscript pages, and she stood at his desk a minute or so before he looked up and handed her a four-page scene from a crime drama that Dick Hayes was set to star in. “Something's wrong with it, too grim or something, see what you can do.” He went back to his reading without saying anything else.

She went out into the hallway. The Barracks was partitioned into several small rooms, many of them windowless, and she looked into several until she found two men sitting at a desk. One was typing as the other one leaned over his shoulder, smoking a cigarette, frowning down at the words as they rolled off the keys. There was a small window in one wall, but the venetian blind was closed to keep out the daylight.

“Find an empty desk in an empty room,” the typist said without looking up. Lily hadn't asked them anything.

She went into one of the small, windowless rooms, and in a couple of hours she rewrote the scene in the Dick Hayes movie and turned it in. Lampman didn't look at the revised pages, just tossed them onto a pile on his desk, then stood up and poked around in the bookshelves behind him until he found the book he was looking for. He reached it out to her. “Write a treatment for a picture,” he said, and picked up his own reading again.

What she turned in a couple of days later was not a film treatment but a carefully reasoned four-page opinion that the book would never make a movie. Lampman put the report on top of his pile of papers and said without looking up, “I'm busy. Ask around, find something to work on.”

Gradually she learned not to bother him when his door was closed—to turn in her projects to a box on the hallway floor. He seldom offered an opinion about her work. She thought he might send her back down to the reading room when he got around to reading her report on the novel, but one of the other writers told her it was a project several people had already wrestled with—that Lampman knew it would never make a movie. So after a couple of weeks she took his silence to mean she was now officially a junior writer.

She spent some of her time in the Barracks working on her own screenplays, which all the junior writers were doing, and some of the time helping out other writers with their projects. And then she helped Bob Hewitt finish a two-reel comedy for one of Sunrise's minor stars. Movie programs in those days always included a few one- or two-reel short films—newsreels, comedies, travelogues, cartoons—and the junior writers had a better chance of getting a two-reel picture on the floor than a feature. So after they finished work on the comedy, she and Bob wrote and submitted a lot of ideas for short comedies and cartoons. The staff writers were on six-month contracts, but the junior writers were hired week to week, and throwing a lot of ideas out there was how they kept themselves employed.

Well, this wasn't what she had hoped for. Lily wanted to be writing about real human conflicts, real people and their problems, but was stuck writing trivial scripts with dancing animals and idiotic plots for pratfall comedians. The Dick Hayes crime drama she had written a scene for was filmed without her scene, and as far as she knew, none of the two-reel stories she and Bob wrote or proposed ever made it onto the screen. She wrote an audition piece for a young actress Lampman had said was in line to be the studio's new star, but the ingénue's name never made it into lights.

Still, she was working—
writing
—at a busy studio. And while she waited for an assignment or a reaction to a script, she and Bob visited the outdoor sets and the sound stages, and they went into a cutting room and watched an editor at a Moviola machine, cutting strips of film and splicing them together, shaping the first rough cut into something resembling a picture. Lily wasn't star-struck—she knew that the actors and directors she was watching were nowhere near Hollywood's best. But she kept a notebook in her pocket and wrote down everything she saw and heard. In later years, whenever she talked about her beginnings in Hollywood and the seven weeks she worked at Sunrise Pictures, she rarely mentioned Marion Chertok or Dale Lampman. She talked about those second-rate directors and what she'd learned from watching them make their second-rate movies.

I only saw Bob Hewitt one time, when he brought Lily to the hospital after I was hurt; I don't think we spoke a word to each other. I can tell you Bob wasn't much to look at. He had russet hair and a chin that sloped back to his neck. The most interesting thing about him, as far as Lily ever said, was that he got her jokes.

When Lily met him, Bob had just come out of college in Chicago or Boston or someplace like that. He had ambitions to be a story editor at a big studio, but while he waited for one of the periodic shakeups at Warner Brothers or Paramount to open a door he could walk through, his uncle, who was an attorney for a couple of studios, had finagled him the job at Sunrise.

Lily told me he was a decent-not-great writer but a top-drawer critic, with an ear for good dialogue. After she showed him
Death Rides the Sky
, he told her his uncle might be able to get the story in front of someone at RKO if she changed a couple of things. And while the two of them were working on the revision, Lily and Bob wound up sleeping together.

Later on, when she wrote about this part of her life, she said Bob was the first man to show interest in her. Well, I had shown interest, and she had told me we couldn't be friends if I thought she was fast. Years later, when I brought this up, she said she didn't care if Bob thought she was fast—her feelings for Bob weren't complicated by friendship. But there might have been more to it than that.

Once she had made up her mind to lose her innocence, she wanted to get it over with: she thought she might not have another chance unless she married, which she didn't plan to do. But she had ruled me out: I was acting pretty reckless in those days, and though Lily would never have admitted it, she was a little bit scared of the whole “having sex” thing. So it's not hard to guess why she picked Bob Hewitt to give her a past—he was genial and safe, and he was the boy at hand.

Lily always sounded perfectly clear on her reasons for just about anything she did.

AFTER SEVEN WEEKS AT SUNRISE
, Lily got fired the same day Steve Deets got in a wreck, which we'll get to next. When she told me she'd been let go, she said it was on account of the studio not having enough work to keep the junior writers busy, but this was a lie. Later, when this all came out, she said, “Bud, you were such a goddamned cowboy back then.” I guess she had good reason to think I was inclined that way—that I might go after Lampman like I thought I was Tom Mix or Buck Jones. We both knew a cowboy hero wouldn't let a man get away with molesting a woman.

I didn't hear the real story until about 1949, and if I thought Lily would have wanted it to stay off the record, I wouldn't be writing about it now. But she went ahead and wrote about it herself, more or less, in
Dangerous
, the first picture she and Mike Beahrs produced together; and she told it again in her Hollywood memoir, though she left out all the names; Lampman was the head of Lighthouse Pictures by then, and Lily had become savvy about Hollywood politics. So both times she told the story she told it slant, and it seems to me I can only tell it straight, the way she finally told it to me.

After she moved over to the Barracks and became a writer, she saw less of Dale Lampman. She mostly saw him in the commissary where they ate lunch every day, and it was a crowded place, with actors and actresses and extras in costumes—Roman gladiators, cowboys, women in ball gowns—all of them in heavy layers of makeup, streaming in from the sets to grab a bowl of soup or a sandwich. The writers sat together at their own table, but Lampman never joined them: he and Marion Chertok sat together at a small table off in the corner.

Then one afternoon when she was walking through the western street on her way back from lunch, he swung in alongside her. “I've been thinking I might give you a piece of the Louis Jossup script, see if you can do something with it.” This was a project she had heard people talking about, a comic western with a lot of problems; several writers had worked on parts of it. “Jossup doesn't like the saloon scene. Thinks it won't work for his slapstick.”

“Then the comedy should be in the dialogue,” she said, because this was her strong preference anyway.

Lampman shrugged. “The kid's got a rubber body, that's his gimmick. He doesn't go for the jokes.” He took hold of her elbow suddenly and steered her toward the saloon. “Here, you need to get a look at the set.”

In recent weeks Lampman had barely looked at her, seldom spoken to her; the only woman she had seen him with was Marion. She had just about forgotten his reputation among the girls in the reading department. But with his hand on her elbow, she suddenly remembered
dangerous
, and turned her arm to get free from his grip.

He tightened his hand. “Don't be a girl,” he said in a mocking way and pulled her along. She said, “Well, don't drag me,” as if that was the point.

He laughed and let go of her arm and walked on ahead. When he went into the dim saloon, he held the batwing doors open for her. She stood a moment on the boardwalk and then followed him in. “Like a goddamned
girl!
” she told me.

There was no one else in the saloon. The set was crowded with unused equipment—cameras, booms, shiny reflector boards, heavy lights on telescoping stands. The air inside was dusty and cold. “All this junk will be out of here,” Lampman said, sweeping an arm, “but the kid's right, there's not much room for the camera to follow him if he's throwing himself around like a rubber ball.” He brought his arms up and shaped a small frame with his hands. “See? You'd have to keep the action inside the box.” He moved his arms back and forth, like a camera following some movement out there. Then he backed up a couple of steps, took her elbow again, and pulled her to stand in front of him. “Here, look here, you'll get the idea.”

He brought his arms up and made the small square with his hands again, close to her face. His barrel chest came forward to rest against her upper back—the heat and weight of him suddenly intimate. In that moment she became conscious of him as a big, powerful man, a man twice her size. She took a step ahead to get clear of his arms, but he dropped his big hands to her hips and pulled her back against him—it was almost playful—and then in a single smooth motion ran his hands up the front of her dress and squeezed her breasts.

She pushed at his thick wrists. “Don't!”

He laughed. “You haven't got any tits to worry about, honey.” He brought his head down and nuzzled her neck with a wet mouth. As she grappled with him, her own hand knocked her glasses off her face. He pressed and rubbed himself against her and with one hand pulled open several of the buttons on the front of her dress. When his hand came inside her clothes, his breath became harsh and quick, but not from effort. For the first time in her life she had a panicky awareness of her own frailty, her powerlessness. She fought him, but it was a brief, silent wrestling match—she didn't shout or scream or cry out, whether from embarrassment or shame, she only wondered about afterward.