Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (3 page)

“Oh, Christ, I don’t know. Bothered? Sure, bother me with Marlene Dietrich, and lobster and hotel keys. Try that line out on the guys in the foxholes. I’m luckier than an Irishman with a dentist.”

“It wasn’t luck! It was talent. My God, was it talent. And they aren’t in foxholes anymore, so there.”

“Nope. They’re in graves and I made a bundle.
Time
put those two jokers of mine on the cover while I was still drawing sergeant’s pay. What was every other GI hoping to come home to if he didn’t get his ass shot off? God willing, a wife; God willing, a job. And we got the bestseller list. Pammie, help me out! I’m sorry, but there aren’t that many people who would know. Don’t you ever feel shitty?”

“When I compare your book to mine, you’d better believe I do.”

Some author Bill was, since he just looked annoyed. “That’s not what I meant.”

“I know, but leave it be. Leave it be,” I repeated, a locution Pam had never used before. “They had their job, we had ours. And you could have gotten your ass shot off lots of times. So could I have once or twice.”

Beyond him, Chasen’s was up to its favorite conjuring trick. The opening door’s brief reminder of prosaically (!) sunlit Beverly Boulevard revealed that what we’d been lulled into taking for a homey setting was a den of specially lit vaults, its human swag briefly caught in the act of getting up to visit other money. By now, however, even the draftsman in Bill wasn’t interested.

“You weren’t in the Army, remember? I was. If you’d gotten killed, it would’ve been an accident. Just an awful, horrible, awful fucking not supposed to happen, like the nurses. We’d have felt lousy for, I don’t know, maybe a week. A
week
,
Pam! You know what that means.”

“Sure I do, Bill. All this flattery is making me dizzy.”

I wished he hadn’t mentioned the nurses, and not only because—along with lots of other things that didn’t fit the tone—they’d been left out of
Nothing Like a Dame
.
Nor was I sure Bill had ever read “The Gates of Hell,”
by Pamela Buchanan
’s report from Dachau, whose most opportunistic stratagem he’d have seen right through and probably been offended by. Leave it be, leave it be: I was a writer.

“Just listen, will you?” he said. “For me it’s the other way around. The Army thought it was getting another rifleman, more meat for the grinder. But even my Purple Heart was for a scratch—and here I am. Guess who I owe it to? Maybe I even met the guy. Then I tooled back down the road in my little jeep and he got it instead.”

“This is the stupidest horseshit I’ve ever heard in my life,” I told him, an exaggeration that would’ve had Murphy beaming at his unwarranted reprieve. “
Instead?
Everyone could’ve been anyone, you know it. Guilt is a form of vanity.”

“Sure is,” he agreed with an aplomb that told me the charge’s only surprise was that it was conversational, not internal. “Because there’s always that other little voice. You know it.”

“I’ve got lots of voices, Bill.”

“It’s the one that keeps saying, ‘That was the best of it. You’re done. At twenty-six, kiddo, you’re done. Drink up.’”

“Well, you aren’t. And even if you were, so’s Goya.”

“That’s funnier than you think. I didn’t know what my book was turning into back home—I mean here—until some egghead attacked me in an art magazine. Now,
he
kept bringing up Goya: ‘
Los Desastres
,’ you know. Point was I’d given folks a sort of Uncle Remus war, because Goya had headless torsos in trees and I never drew one corpse.”

“Why, that’s absurd,” I said, not least since I’d never realized he
hadn’t
.
And I knew—and I know—Bill’s cartoons by heart.

“Well, I’m a pretty simple boy. Being
unfavorably
compared to Goya still felt like a heady brew. But I did think about it, account of Whacksmith sounded so sure, and right or wrong I told myself, ‘Same subject, buddy. Different jobs.’ Goya had to show people what war really looked like, didn’t he? The guys I was drawing for already knew. They didn’t need that—from me.”

“Uh-huh. And if you’re curious, you just told me what’s eating you.”

“Besides Linda Darnell not coming back, you mean? I was really just trying to kill some time.”

“Oh, I know that. Heaven forbid we should pretend you matter, Bill—to you, to—me or to anyone. But it isn’t about coming back in one piece, all right? Or even making a bundle.”

“Can’t make you feel sorry for me, huh?”

“Wrong again, because I do. Bill, Bill! I’m so smart it’s scary. Marlene was right too, only I got distracted.”

“That’s what she’s for. That’s the formula.”

“Listen!” I commanded, exhilarated by my prowess at being maternal or perhaps only sisterly. Though not a twin, for that had been a battlefield promotion revoked by Bill’s talent. “What’s gone wrong is you can’t love them anymore.”

“Can’t love who?”

“Whom. You can’t love the guys in the foxholes the way you did when they were in foxholes now that they aren’t in foxholes, and it’s driving you crazy. You can be as good as anything, you can draw until your fingers bleed, and you aren’t ever going to have an
audience
you care about that way. Not that I mean to pick a fight with the Catholic Church,” I lied, “but sainthood isn’t about the saint. The best saint in the world is only as good as his flock.”

“Honey, were we really in
Italy
together?”

“Oh, fuck you. Fuck you in Napoli while the chambermaid watches us,” I said and gathered I’d better move on. “I was writing for fat-assed civilians in Darien and places. Of
course
I want those idiots to think
I’m
wonderful! You were drawing for the guys and you miss thinking
they’re
wonderful. How can you now that they’re all back to buying Studebakers, cheating on their taxes and voting Republican?”

I’d love to tell you Bill shouted “Eureka!” and strode forth from Chasen’s a new man. I still think I was right, but that’s not how life works. “Maybe so,” was all he said. Then, “Did I ever tell you what I was going to do with my two jokers?”

“No.”

“I was going to kill them. I ain’t sure when I knew, but one day I knew that had to be the last cartoon. They were going to be the last two guys to get it in the ETO the day the war ended. It had to be them.”

“Why, pray?”

“So it wouldn’t be anybody else! It was every GI’s nightmare. It was mine.”

“What happened?”

“Oh,
Stars and Stripes
nixed it.”

Fresh out of other ideas that excluded disrobing, our waitress finally brought our next round. Still wearing a shriven look—maybe Cary Grant had starred in
I Was a Male War Bride
,
but Carole Lombard’s plane crash had retired the lead in
I Was a Male War Widow—
Clark Gable came through the door, his broad shoulders maneuvering from the ever problematic street into a realm where he wasn’t unusual. I raised my glass: “To Oz.”

Ruefully, Bill smiled. “To Oz.”

Posted by: Pamzio

Or to one damn Oz after another, as Tim Cadwaller—another latecomer who thinks it's all about Bert Lahr and 1939 Technicolor, not Bill's and my cherished L. Frank Baum—puts it in
You Must Remember This: The Posthumous Career of World War Two
.
Each turned into Kansas as we left it, and still you fucking children wonder why my generation boozed. We didn’t have that many constants.

I still rue how Bill didn’t stay one of Pam’s. That’s not only because his two jokers are swapping tales on Parnassus with Paul Bunyan and these mimsy borogoves you know as your Gramela’s glaucomedic eyes watched an imp in a knit cap scrounge for paper to draw them on. However little Bill's cartoons resemble that odd duck Sean Finn’s perverse comic books about  the superpower diaspora, Nan’s strange son reveres him and would plainly have given anything, anything!, for intimate converse with my Anzio Bobbsey twin face to face. I might have had a decent chat myself with Sean for a change when we compared adult heights at the glorious girl’s Christmas party a dozen Yules or so back if he hadn't looked crestfallen—and accusing, which was a bit self-promotional if you ask me—at hearing that his hero and I were no longer in touch.

Bill’s later adventures on Clio were stranger than mine, and that’s why I like to picture us bumping into each other on layovers now and again. We’d have caught up as propeller and then jet engines reorchestrated our century’s tornado: me watching a succession of hemlines go up, then down, then up, then down on the Buchanan gams, Bill testing how much history could crowd that cherub face without turning its grins Luddite or worse. The reverie gets iced each time Pink Thing’s archives reconfirm that Chasen’s was and now always will be the last time we met.

Since he had his pride and Chet Dooley had offended it, even Pam’s services as a Los Angeles sherpa were declined with a non-answer to my welcoming telegram—or did it just go undelivered? Only Western Union knows—when Bill came back in ’51 to watch Universal shoot his two jokers and then stayed on awhile. Unlike me, unless Pam’s mute parody of an extra in
The Gal I Left Behind Me
counts, he ended up on the screen himself, acting or pretending to alongside Audie Murphy in an adaptation of
The Red Badge of Courage
—a project that made my second husband suffer. Passionate to see history resurrected on film, Gerson had been trying to get a Civil War picture on track forever, but Metro’s pashas let Dore Schary do that one.

Once or twice during
Red Badge
’s looping, Mrs. Gerson, as I was by then, saw or thought she saw Bill chowing down at one of the commissary’s long tables. Unsure if he’d forgiven me for
The Gal
, I knew that was no place to find out, especially since Huston was there. He was contentedly stroking the jawbone of an ass as usual with those prehensile fingers, and I’ll never figure out what made a smartypants like Lillian Ross fall for
that
sawdust-leaking act.

I also had and have no idea if Bill took the part as a lark or was trying out a way of being “Bill M.” whose propinquity vis-à-vis Bill M. would make sense to him. He only appeared in one other movie before giving up the whim, celluloid’s help in objectifying intimations of spuriousness clearly not having done for him what it did for Audie—who held them at bay for fifteen years by playing in Westerns whose only tension was the abiding mystery of his imploringly boyish face, not Dorian Gray’s so much as our own Dorian Khaki’s. While an actor he wasn’t, that Medal of Honor we remembered was a sort of inoculatory super-Oscar.

According to
You Must Remember This
,
which I don’t doubt is trustworthy research-wise even if I never did read it all the way through, Bill next decamped pen, pad, and helmet to Korea, that reject pile of bits of World War Two that hadn’t been fought at the time; it wasn’t his war. More touching for Pam was learning that he’d gotten his pilot’s license sometime in the Fifties and was soon flying his own plane, since the motivation for that grab at autonomy was crystal clear to his fellow passenger on Clio. I hadn’t forgotten watching Jessie Auster turn into a dot in the sky.

Trying to be good for something while denying he was good
at
something, as Tim puts it in one of his better guesses about the man, Bill made a quixotic run for Congress and lost to some Republican windmill. He didn’t go back to full-time cartooning until Eisenhower’s second term. Then he stuck to his last for thirty years, and as I recall he only brought back his two
Stars and Stripes
jokers for Omar Bradley’s funeral. But not ex-President Ike’s, and my hunch is Bill couldn’t bring himself to draw that pair saluting
any
politician.

When the newspapers said he was ailing with Alzheimer’s, of course I wrote him. Going by the photographs, my knit-capped Aladdin had certainly blown up into a Jeremiac bullfrog, but by 2003 Bill’s onetime Anzio Bobbsey twin was no very succulent morsel either. Got no answer, didn’t expect any. Something like ten thousand other people had been moved to write to him too, and they were on more intimate terms with him. They were mostly perfect strangers, and at best I’d have been an imperfect one.

Posted by: Pam

When you’re as ancient as we were and only I still am,
the most persistent revisers of your own muddled first-draft sense of what the whole shebang was about are other people’s obituaries—from Bill’s three years ago to, a good deal more recently, Dottie Idell’s. Not so the twenty-odd inches the
Post
gave in November 1986 (the
NYT
was stingier, and Tim, Chris, and I all said “Fuck ’em”) to ex–Lieutenant Commander, then Ambassador “Hopsie” Cadwaller. In that case I already knew my own emotions blindfolded.

It was a few weeks after we’d buried your great-grandfather that catching sight of
Nothing Like a Dame
’s brittle spine in our living room’s newly insensitive bookcases gave me my first real pang of mortification at its light-heartedness since Bill’s and my boozy afternoon in Chasen’s. My one and only World War Two, and I’d vamped it up into 253 pages of taffy.

Even though
You Must Remember This
does its best to exonerate me, I’m afraid Marlene Dietrich was right. I’d always been able to hedge my remorse
by deflecting it into contempt for
The Gal I Left Behind Me
’s worse inanities, but the bungled screen version had long since stopped airing even on the Insomnia Channel and the silly, flirty book was still there.
My
book,
by Pamela Buchanan
, with Bill’s fond cover art its major value to collectors even then. Coquettishness wasn’t his specialty, but he’d given me a saucy come-hitler look and added a fun comma of Garbodacious cleavage when I lankily modeled fists to hips and chin atilt in surplus fatigues.

Wined and dined by a waxy Andy and now rewined in the Georgetown house I sold inside a year to take up my falcon roost at the Rochambeau, a Pam then only in her mid-sixties pulled
Nothing
out to ponder Bill’s already unrecognizable caricature. Wondered what had become of the original, then got hugely annoyed at how my Greta-garbling thoughts had tricked me into a maudlin, movieishly mawkish, blundering double meaning. Tossed the book, grew gradually aware my wineglass wasn’t a pet—i.e., summonable by flopping my hand in its general direction—and refilled it. Soon was quoting and requoting my favorite made-up line for Judy Garland: “Toto, I’m blotto.”

I refuse to blame Cath Charters. For
Nothing
’s vapidity, not my 1986 hangover. Roy’s ex was not only doing her job as my agent but did it damned well. When I crossed my legs and put up my hands in her office, I didn’t have a clue what sort of book I wanted to get published, and note phrasing. Everyone I knew was getting contracts for them and one rather felt one was traipsing around in last summer’s organdy without a Random House advance. I was frantic to catch her interest, also to divert it. Never did learn for sure if amiably meowing Cath knew about my Pleistocene sessions of the old buck and wing with Roy during my divorce from Murphy.

So I made haste with the bright, evasive anecdotes: “From Co-Respondent to Correspondent,” “Never Ask for Towels on a Troopship,” “Mark Clark’s Nose Is Out of Joint,” “Undone in London,” “Omaha Ha-Ha’s,” “Eddie’s Norman Conquest,” “Hurtin’ in the Huertgen,” and the dismal rest of
Nothing
’s eventual table of contents. Pam’s thought was that once I’d got done thawing the icy crap out of her, we’d get down to what I’d really seen, and while all I may have meant by that was anecdotes with a grimmer, more crimson-laced, whey-faced palette, now I’ll never know. What Cath knew was the sales figures for
See Here, Private Hargrove
, to which—forgive me, Bill—
Nothing
got
favorably
compared.