Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (20 page)

Instead, Fran got her Emmy. Not for drama, though: comedy. Not many delighted and riotous Americans ever knew
Proscenium
’s original intent had been to elevate them, but the industry grapevine bottled wine off Gerson’s comeuppance for years.

Too anxious to more than pick at Ava’s guacamole, he turned on the set an hour early, fussing with its rabbit ears. Watching TV felt more active then: a challenge to our ingenuity. To make him laugh, I brightly asked, “Why is tonight different from all other nights?,” but he didn’t think it was funny. Vaporous with postpartum authorial confusion about what magazines and other people’s books were for, I busied myself elsewhere, barely heeding the brawls and shots in the living room: “Give me ten minutes to get out of town, Pard? I’ll give you Ten…Steps…Back.” Then Gerson called, “Pammie, it’s starting.”

“Pro-
SEE-knee-yum!” the announcer boomed as Greek masks of comedy and tragedy played musical chairs before settling in place. Doing his research, Gerson’d had the Pantages Theater mocked up as one from the Belle Époque, but Gene Rickey had scotched his plea to dress the whole audience in turn-of-the-century evening wear. Only the first two rows got outfitted, and they were the ones shown filing in.

As Cornelius Ryan might put it, the text was abridged too far. That was partly thanks to One Eye’s ninety-minute time slot and partly because Fran wanted a grand entrance. “This is a hell of a lot of rhubarb and rhubard and ketchup and crotch rot before I show up,” she’d muttered, and Gerson had agreed to open with Hamlet’s first soliloquy.

The Pantages curtains parted to reveal a rampart at Elsinore, empty for five full tense seconds. Then Fran swept in, magnificent in a black wig and doublet. She actually looked more like Sarah Bernhardt in the photographs of Bernhardt costumed as Hamlet than I would’ve guessed she could. For a sixth and seventh full tense second, I wondered whether Gerson’s hope might possibly come true.

Fran extended an arm. “
Ohhh
,
that this too too solid flesh would melt!” she groaned thrillingly.

A wave of delighted laughter crashed into a surf of applause, making the looks of studious Belle Époque-y concentration from the period extras in the two front rows look even daffier in the reaction shot. And understand: during three weeks of rehearsal, Fran had worked terribly hard. She’d not only memorized the surviving chunks of her part, but listened to Gerson explaining Sarah Bernhardt’s grand manner and the period’s theatrical conventions. He’d told me that there’d been moments in the final run-through when the mutation of Fran into Sarah and then Sarah into Hamlet had even him forgetting she was Fran, an obvious thrill for more than one reason.

Yet not only had a junkie just heard the sound of auditory heroin. A trouper had grasped the jig was up, and old Fran hands in the know swear you can’t see her blink. Of course Gerson and I were too unnerved by the laughter to realize that
Proscenium
’s star, unlike the prince she was playing, was making her greatest decision in a heartbeat. On live TV, with Rik-Kuk’s future at One Eye riding on the outcome and eighty-nine minutes to go.

She rolled her eyes. “Brother! What I’d give for a cheese Danish,” she told the camera. “If this diet don’t kill me, my stepfather will.”

As it’s available on DVD, I don’t suppose I need to rehash all of
Proscenium
’s legendary 1956 slapstick
Hamlet
here on harried little
daisysdaughter.com
. I’ve met stubborn folk who refuse to believe it was all improvised, but they didn’t know Fran Kukla. Nor could Fran have guessed that her whole career—the burlesque days, the TKO bit parts, the radio stint
,
and the four seasons of
That’s My Fran—
had been preparation for this astonishing cavalry charge into the jaws of death.

Everyone I’ve talked to has a favorite gag. Fran accompanying “When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause” by holding up her hands squirrel-style and glancing at them, then us, in toothy consternation; I’ve had that one reprised to my face many times. Fran popping up midway through Polonius’s burblings to gasp, “Kind of like listening to John Foster Dulles, isn’t it?” Or the famous moment when the actor playing Horatio, who like the rest of the cast had been struggling to stick to the text up to then, answers the speech that ends “the triumph of our pledge” by asking, “Sweet prince, is Pledge among our sponsors?” She whirls on him with a glare of affronted hauteur, all the funnier since it was genuine.

And Gerson? In our Beverly Hills living room, Gerson looked as if his dentist had decided to try eye surgery after strapping him to the chair. We watched with clenched jaws and tensed paws, and soon we didn’t dare glance at each other. After Gerson’s murmured “No, no,” neither of us spoke a word. Then Fran picked up Yorick’s skull, rubbed her own wigged one (I winced: the mallet had cracked it just six hours earlier)
,
and bawled, “Forty-nine cents for
cabbage?
Cripes! What’s Denmark
coming
to?”

Oh, Panama! I damn near keeled over laughing. So did my pained yet undeluded husband, recognizing that the game was done—and Fran Kukla had won, had won. We roared, we snorted. My Gerson slapped his thigh. We laughed ’til we cried.

Posted by: Pamlet

You know the rest, Tim. All three Borsht Brothers coming out of retirement to send up Junius, Edwin, and John Wilkes Booth’s 1864 version of
Julius Caesar
.
Fran’s own return doing Eleonora Duse as Camille. Once they realized having a historic production for reference wasn’t pertinent anymore, it got easier: Jimmy Durante’s Cyrano. Perhaps in worse taste, George Shearing’s jazz
Oedipus Rex
.
None was as inspired as the spontaneous original, but Pam did learn in a letter from Eve—dehusbanded and sans TV, I was living in Paris by then—that the Hal Lime demolition of
Doctor Faustus
,
with Fran’s dowdy
That’s My Fran
costar Mamie Dwight cameo-ing as Helen of Troy, was a scream.

And no, Tim: I’m not offended by your opinion that
Proscenium
’s forgotten and solemn original concept had an
echt-
Fifties middlebrow pathos. I agree that the show
everyone roared at was more original and just plain better. But even granting that Gerson had an ultimately triumphant longing to see the past revived in modern configurations rather than starting fresh, I’ll never buy your contention that the mistake made by earnest fellows like him was to see TV as too literally a medium—a novel way of transmitting the traditional—rather than a new art form in its own right.

It’s simple, young Mr. Cadwaller: nobody my age will ever keep a straight face when we hear television called an art form. “What’s Denmark
coming
to?” we’re more likely to bawl.

Not counting DVD Kirstenings or my first husband’s three-headed resurrection on the Murphy Channel, I don’t watch much anymore. I certainly couldn’t take more than a cringing minute or two of the hideous sitcoms an aging Fran Kukla did when her ego was driving her time and again to recapture people’s love of
That’s My Fran
.
By then, she didn’t give the Frank Uklas who impersonated her after hours (there were four Frans at the Stonewall rebellion) much room for exaggeration.

When I wonder what made her so strident, it’s probably no surprise I circle back to the one aspect of Fran with which I felt an affinity. Do you know, I think it was all about her hair? When she did Bernhardt and Duse on
Proscenium
,
she wore a wig both times, but on any series she starred in, a wig wasn’t an option. That orange frizz of madness was her television trademark, staying unchanged even when her blurry eyes and turgid jaw had no more flexibility in reacting to events than the cameras whose glassy stare she seemed by then to be emulating for mimetic protection.

When I was revolved if not resolved to face my own follicular sorrows in salon mirrors, did Pam ever consider a wig herself? Oh, hell no. By the early-Sixties heyday of Baez and Bardotlatry, I was too used to being out of competition, and anyhow my straits were less dire. Fran’s orange frizz put my brindle mop in perspective, and
my
hairdressers were encouraged to do their very best, not their worst. Above all, I wasn’t parading my coif in front of millions of viewers who adored me for making women look stupid.

I can think of a few silly shows I’ve enjoyed over the years. I was quite fond of Goldie Hawn on
Laugh-In
. Still, I’m afraid I never so much as sampled the series you and Panama used to rave about, Tim, even at the FDR Memorial—
Roseanne the Umpire Slayer
or whatever it was called—and I’ll never know what people mean when they say they’re addicted. The only exception in my case had several motivations besides quality.

I’d never paid any mind to daytime TV, but a husband wincing at IVs at Bethesda Naval Hospital makes habit go by the wayside. Until I switched channels after my brief exposure to Mack “Paddy” McMartin in his game-show host guise, I hadn’t known
The Good Life with Dottie Crozdetti
existed, much less that it had been running opposite
Wasn’t That Us?
for years and years. Then there Dottie was in her kitchen, brandishing a plucked chicken by the neck and puffing her cheeks to go “Buck, buck, buck.”

Pamique almost didn’t recognize her pre–Pearl Harbor Bank Street roommate, now grown much stouter and grayer as well as forty-five years older. The wayward nose, blonde hair, rosy complexion, wide prominent cheekbones, dimples
,
and unpredictably tossed chin—all gone. Only her blue eyes and mischievous small teeth were the same.

All through Cadwaller’s long dying and up to Dottie’s retirement too soon afterward, I never missed an episode. Yet unlike Fran Kukla’s
Hamlet
,
The Good Life with…
has never been on DVD. When I read Dottie’s obituary, one of my odder thoughts—I don’t think it would’ve displeased her—was that now maybe everything would come out at last, the many seasons I’d missed included. Now I’ll never know.

Kirsten, you’ll have to watch them instead. I’m sorry, darling: Pamlet’s made her decision. You lost.

Yes, Ard: I’m back on course for Dog Green. I’ve got Pink in the landing craft with me and we’re holding hands. She’s wearing the very Googlable low-cut black thingamabob she barely had on at the 2003 Grammys, with the vent up to here that shows off her thigh tattoo and her strap boots. I generally prefer her blonde and rather hope she won’t sing before we hit the beach, but her jaguar grin is fierce and she looks adorable.

Posted by: Pam

Come to think of it, the invisibly tanned Gerson who stayed in touch after our divorce could’ve probably given me some tips about handling this endearingly light little gun in my lap. Just lucky he didn’t have access to weaponry after
Proscenium
’s broadcast, and not only because back then he didn’t know a safety catch from a light switch.

Yes, he’d laughed. He confessed he’d been crimping his lips not to since Fran’s John Kukla Dulles ad lib. I’d been crimping mine since the actress playing Ophelia sashayed onstage belting out “Love for Sale” after “To be or not to be,” answering each of Hamlet’s rebukes with another jitterbugging chorus. Sadly, she never worked for Rik-Kuk again: Fran was still Fran, and the routine had crowded her.

Gerson wouldn’t have been my Gerson if he’d managed to sit through Fran Kukla’s
Hamlet
stony-faced. That didn’t mean he took any pleasure in his dream project’s success on these terms once we’d darked our TV set and the first congratulatory calls started jangling. When he went up to bed, he looked shattered. When he came down to breakfast, he looked glued.

Whatever he’d used, he’d done a practical job with the pottery, without much regard for aesthetics or more than approximating his former appearance. “You know what, Pammie,” he said. “Maybe I’m not cut out for TV.”

“You’re not cut out for Fran, we know that. But she’s the paper doll, not you.”

“She also understands this country better than we ever will. Not even saying that’s good, bad, indifferent, just true.”

“No plurals,” I blurted maladroitly, making him stare. Weren’t
we
a we? Hadn’t I just called us one, for heaven’s sake? But I was speaking as Haroun Pam-Raschid.
Glory Be
was due out in October.

Even so, the return of my authorial dementia was stoked by fresh compassion. I do and must think the feeling was genuine, no matter how gaga. Now that
Proscenium
had turned into what it had turned into—and if Gene Rickey’s nighttime call had been gushing, his morning one was an eager bark for more classic plays to lampoon—I was more convinced than ever that my book was Gerson’s only hope.

Making me believe I was not only right but that he agreed with me, he threw himself like a lemming into planning
Glory Be
’s Romanoff’s party. He didn’t have much else to do, since he’d taken himself off
Proscenium
as soon as Guapo Borsht was mentioned as a likely John Wilkes Booth. The bathrobed, striped-pajamaed man I knew in those days—“I’ve let Ursula go. This is Frau Schildkraut”—told a pleased but puzzled Gene that he was shut away working on an idea for a sitcom about a zany American war correspondent who’d met a Buchenwald inmate she felt sorry for.

Though less depressed than Gerson by
Proscenium
’s mutation, more than once forcing myself to look sympathetically down in the dumps when all I could think of was
Glory Be’
s imminence, I did feel oddly agitated by what it all meant. In my youth—first time you’d called it
that
,
Pammie!—even the least reflective of us had been sure we were duking it out with mighty times. In the Thirties and Forties, believe me, inconsequentiality wasn’t our worry. Now the game was done—we’d won, we’d won—and our reward was Fran Kukla’s
Hamlet
.

In odd hours, which more and more of them were—no one’s ends are looser than an author’s in the final countdown to publication, and besides my marriage had gone funny—I chivvied those fleas around the track. I wanted my mind to arrive at some sort of declaration on the topic of whether heroism was a demand forced on people by necessity or a thrilling ambition irrespective of circumstances; whether it was the poem or what you did when the world said you had to so that you could go back to whatever you defined as poetry—silliness, merriment, pratfalls
,
and comfort. I look pensive in my photo in
Vogue
.

When it finally came out,
Glory Be
didn’t do as well as I’d hoped. It’s possible my yardstick was to blame, since I wanted and at times expected it to wreak havoc on the 1956 election, somehow giving us President Kefauver; to destroy Gene Rickey as Carthage had been destroyed, tossing Fran on the pyre like an orange-frizzed pine cone; to improve my hair,
gonfle
my tatas, and restore my Gerson to what he’d been when I’d met him. By more middling standards, the thing was a smash. It spent months on the bestseller lists, neck and neck with
Profiles in Courage—
a book conceived, let’s say to be polite, out of a muddled impulse not too dissimilar from mine by one of the most cautious politicians in America.

I suppose I shouldn’t have sold the TV rights to Rik-Kuk, but Cath Charters said they’d made the best offer. Though the series never materialized, that the book was even bought should tell you what kind of success
Glory Be
was. Anyhow, by then Gerson didn’t work for Gene Rickey anymore. The sale was a betrayal only of a Gerson he’d left behind him, and his answer to my letter confessing it was amused.