Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (7 page)

For instance, it was a meek Hershey bar, not my idiot Lucky Strikes, that the nurse was on the verge of pulling from her breast pocket to push through the
Arbeit Macht
Frei
gate when the shavetail lieutenant shouted at us to quit. That kind of thing was all right. So was resorting to an anodyne “Later” to get her inside the prisoners’ compound, something I only did under escort the next day. Not without a teeth-clenched inner “Fuck you,” I admit, since my rival—her deadlines were tighter, like her skirts and her curls and her coiled pissy cunt—had shedaddled by the time they let us correspondents in.

I’d reluctantly introduced the nurse after realizing the soldier couldn’t see everything, not only because his perspective was limited but because no such entity was within human grasp. As I wrote in “The Gates,” there was no
everything
to Dachau. Something would always be left out, had to be—the story of a single shoe in that place could’ve filled an encyclopedia.

So like the soldier, the nurse just wandered. Unlike me, she didn’t throw up, much less turn a lone MP into Hopalong Cassidy; she was a professional. As she went through the barracks, she was assessing which emaciated not-quite-former people had a chance. (In fact, I was looking for Nachum Unger. As I’ve said, in vain.) Around the time the soldier came upon the officers’ quarters, the nurse found the camp’s infirmary.

Naturally it was for the guards. Unable to grasp that not only were they prisoners but their former victims weren’t, its tenants—poor halitosal Hansel, down with a corn—had been monstrously indignant, so I was told, at being ejected (poor greentoothed skeevy Erich, did you shiver with the flu?) to make room for a handful of inmates.

All the same, it’s true that, like the soldier and the nurse in “The Gates,” Eddie’s and my paths recrossed outside Dachau’s modest crematorium. Modest, you ask? Oh, yes. Unlike Auschwitz, Dachau wasn’t an extermination camp. The thousands who died there died unsystematically: shot, worked to death, succumbing to starvation or disease.

Mauled by trained dogs for entertainment.

In the usual tangle, the couple of hundred as yet unburned bodies our soldiers had found heaped almost to the rafters in the storehouse next to the crematorium were still there. Roy rightly made me cut an overelaborate simile about indecipherable chalk at the top of an oversized blackboard, but I was trying to get across the strangeness of looking
up
at mortality. Ever since, I’ve believed we stick it in the ground to make that state inferior to our own.

Anyhow, that’s when I turned and saw Eddie. While I wouldn’t understand for years that the final sentence of “The Gates of Hell” was also my goodbye to my quip-happy ETO Virgil, I was proudest of it for a note of doubt I don’t think my editor (
“beautiful roy”
) ever caught. Tapped out in Munich on dead Daisy’s typewriter in a two a.m. litter of balled-up pages, overflowing ashtrays, half filled bottles, maimed copies of
Mein Kampf
, and Eddie’s new snores, this was it: “Four living creatures despite it all, their eyes met.”

Posted by: Pam

Hand it to our road-not-taken minds for their ability to miscast us worse than Hollywood at its most Zanuckleheaded. Not only was my mother no caregiver and hence incapable of raising one, but Pam’s only real-world try at “There, there”—comforting a miscarrying actress who’d slept with my husband in a delirious dressing room—had been a mangle of hamfisted Murphine commands and Pamcentric confusions. When I first tried out being my own tailor’s dummy in “The View from Ward Three,” I’d played not soother but casualty: a mock patient mock–ministered to in New Mexico by the trainees I’d named for my old schoolmates.

I’d even felt uncomfortable writing “The Angel of Anzio.” That was partly because I’d never made a heroine out of someone dead before and partly because I hadn’t really known the jolly warm girl I called Dolly Rydell in print. (Even on a beachhead, you can move in different social sets.) When I waded onto Omaha three months later, terrified our wounded would call to me when my only hypo was a pencil, I’d ditched the Red Cross–mooned helmet that made me look like a corpsman faster than you could say Florence Nightingale. Yet I ended up feminizing the same disguise in
by Pamela Buchanan
’s final report from the ETO, possibly earning Bill M.’s disgust if he read “The Gates” and spotted the imposture. If he did—and he had an inscribed first printing of
Nothing
,
after all—he never mentioned it. My only excuse was that a real nurse would’ve been as helpless.

Of course, one advantage of writing for a fat-assed civilian readership in Darien and places is that nobody from Roy on down asked what one would be doing up with front-line combat troops. That’s why Gerson, who’d never been in the military, surprised me by taking my dissimulation for granted. “When I first read that—in
Regent’s
, not to brag—I was touched that you wanted to imagine yourself as a healer,” said the perplexingly (my head was still stuffed with the unbroken crockery of New York cliches) thoughtful man who wanted to put
Nothing
on the screen.

It was the day after my arrival in Los Angeles, and he was showing me around Metro. Delectably spread for the sky’s giant blue appetite, this part of the lot was all whitewashed buildings, soothing lawns. A Swiss Alp got heaved up and relowered beyond them by unseen but cursing workmen. Brisk staffers on errands hurried past somebody dressed as Napoleon.

“I didn’t have much choice,” I stammered. “I mean I couldn’t have been
me!
I wouldn’t have known how. But I couldn’t bring myself to be no one—omniscient—not there. A God’s-eye view made no sense. And then just by process of elimination, you know, why else
would a woman be in Dachau?”

Not at all rudely, Gerson gave a
very
dry chuckle. “You’re right. There are limits. But ach!” (That was deliberate.) “We’ll settle.”

“Yes, there
are
limits! Do you have any idea how—my God, how presumptuous that would’ve been?” If that left him thinking I’d considered dressing myself in a not-quite-former woman’s filthy togs at the typewriter before I virtuously rejected imagination’s promotion and wasn’t just trying to worm out of a gaffe, so be it.

“As a matter of fact, I do. That’s why it’d be a relief to quit trying. Hopeless, but I feel obliged. Shall we go off the lot for lunch?”

“I’m not sure I’d know the difference, so it’s completely up to you.”

Nodding, he took Pam’s elbow with rare calm for someone shorter than me. How many actresses he must’ve steered to water. The real Gerson touch was that he didn’t tell me which we were doing, paradoxical reassurance I was in good hands.

“I’ll tell you something that’ll help,” he offered, correctly interpreting my stare at all the roofless cars. “Hoping, Miss Buchanan, that you do stay on a while. No, L.A. isn’t a real city—that part’s true. It is a real place, though.
The problem for most East Coasters is that they can’t see the forest for the palm trees.”

“Problem for or problem with?”

My future second husband laughed. “Oh! That’s when we get into personalities. But if you’re shrewd enough to ask, my guess is that you’ll love it here. I do.”

“It’s Pam,” I said a bit late. “By the bye.”

Posted by: Pam-Luc Godard

We’d been married several years by the time Gerson, in a rage—not at me—confessed he’d masturbated to
Dame
’s jacket drawing shortly before he placed a movie-rights call to Cath Charters. I’m not trying to shock you or make you think ill o
f h
im; the point was his zest for thinking ill of himself, a subject immune to my input. We always agreed on so much except the standards the ideal Gerson should be held to.

If he’d been puckish about it instead of self-lacerating, he wouldn’t have been the Gerson I wed in ’49 at L.A.’s City Hall; the Gerson who never knew that made two of us, although my understanding was he’d had the actual book propped in his briefly locked office and I’d just gotten the drawing’s lines entwined in a Tijuana-biblical, Myrna-loyal reverie the night before I flew to California. Lax shiksa that I was, I hadn’t felt too incriminated. But Gerson’s penis just blamed him for everything, and its owner put too much stock in individuality’s sacredness to care that most men did it the other way around.

How many marriages founder in confusion over which one’s job it is to heal the other? If you think ours foundered over a silly mental picture of Gerson killing the snake to my book’s cover art, oh please. We were happy before and after that confession. If in temporarily separate ways, we were even happy during, since we both knew his determination to insist some remote core of him was unhealable wouldn’t outlast Pam’s astonishment that he could mistake such flimsy stuff for his core.

Besides, every marriage has its defining time of day, and ours was breakfast, not midnight: Gerson plucking at his orange juice and making jokes at
Variety
as if it were a child that needed a giggle. Me going through decorators’ brochures and sorting invites to the Wilders’, the Kellys’, and the Governor’s Ball until
Glory Be
’s stirrings dungeoned me most nights in my study.

My second book included, all this was unimaginable to me as I began learning my part in what became the incredibly dithering, protracted—and given the results, wasted—chore of turning my first one into a movie. Cath had wangled me a screenplay deal, citing my gift in
Dame
for quick he-she byplay; I later learned she even reminded the studio I’d been married to Bran, a sort of credential by osmosis. Nonetheless, I had to be partnered and immediately was. After our lunch (off the lot, French, delightful), Gerson led me to the writers’ building to meet a sofa with the power of speech named Wylie White.

Reputedly handsomer before booze began playing Rodin, he’d been married for a while to none other than Celia Brady, whose memoir
The Producer’s Daughter
I’d tormented Alisteir Malcolm by reviewing so rhapsodically for the old
Republic
in another life. But I never got to meet Wylie’s ex, not even to thank or spank her for her answering praise of
Nothing Like a Dame
.
As I learned from my first eager inquiries while scanning the room at Hollywood parties, she’d moved to Arizona on doctors’ orders shortly before I reached the West Coast. So my flickering hunch we’d get along like long-lost sisters never got tested outside print: two slim books whose dust jackets (hers annoyingly pictureless) I had a tendency to catch for years peering up side by side each time I unpacked my library.

If not Celia, then I’d hoped to be teamed with Bettina Hecuba, whose credits went back to Griffith and who’d won one o
f l
iterary Manhattan’s rare dispensations from charges of whoring in the California sun. Smart as a tick, she kept in New York’s good graces by impersonating an unrepentant golddigger; I knew I had it made w
hen
Dame
’s first reviewer compared it to Bettina’s expertly addlepated
Now and Then, There’s a Girl Such as I
.
Horrified by the thought of
two
women, neither one shackled to Hollywood (Bettina at least kept five pert toes wiggling East), witching it up on their payroll, Metro’s preference was for a male’s wise hand. Or
wise back, my usual view of Wylie as he slept off the three double martinis that had washed down an elephant’s idea of too few peanuts at lunch.

We got along like gangbusters when he was sleeping, not too badly when he pawed himself awake. Overseeing three other movies’ progress at the time, Gerson had given us marching orders whose fundamental irrelation to reality I was too new to Hollywood to appreciate. Once I did, I understood how men of his caliber might put up with peddling treacly illusions to the public for the sake of the interludes when they got to enjoy the more gallant illusions they’d cooked up for themselves.

Gerson was no hack, far from it. He was a man deeply fired by earnest beliefs, including that movies could and should be better. He’d admired my war reporting, and far from bemoaning “The Gates of Hell”’s inclusion in
Dame
’s first printing, he told me I should’ve done that all the way through—interlarding each chapter of comedy with “The Angel of Anzio,” “Bacchanapoli,” “The Day the Tide Ran Red,” “Tiger! Tiger!,” and my other ETO pieces for
Regent’s
.

“They’re
both
true!” he told Wylie and me firmly. “And if we can make an audience see they’re both true, they’re both always true—the slapstick, the horror, yes? Yes?—then I think we end up showing them that this was a very
American
kind of war. Unless, Pam, you’re really from Winnipeg.”

“The truth is she’s really from Winnipam,” said Wylie. “Peg is her name. I love how he says ‘American,’” he went on once Gerson had left. “It’s like hearing a virgin say ‘Cunt.’ Say it often enough and open sesame, the Great Bush will appear.”

“Oh, I like it,” I said.

“Cunt? So do I. No wonder you wish I was Bettina. That’s the reason I drink, you know. I’d never touched a drop until you—”

“No, you jackass. The way it matters to him.”

“It does,” said Wylie shortly. “But I’ve been around longer than he has, Peg, and one thing I know about Hollywood is that it takes a very smart man to be a real idiot. I’m only a mildly smart man. I’m perfect.”

“You must’ve cared about something once. Just for me, can’t you pretend? I promise I won’t be in Los Angeles long.”

“I am
American. I don’t need to.”

I decided to ignore his implication Passaic wasn’t in the U.S.A., and we settled down to reconciling the Pam Buchanan of
Regent’s
with
Nothing
’s Dame, little knowing—all right, Wylie probably did—she’d turn into The Gal. By my next birthday, in spite of my collaborator’s damn near sestinal siestas and morning yawns of “Tell me again about the lighter side of Dachau,” we had a script I liked. Then a schoolboy, Jean-Luc Godard might’ve liked it too—especially the Godard of
Les Carabiniers
,
one of Tim Cadwaller’s favorites. Even with a Balkan blank like Metro’s Tod Paspartu directing instead, it could’ve made a reasonably good movie, that is if it’d had a snowball’s chance in Trader Vic’s of ever being made.

Since I didn’t have a clue, I was beginning to enjoy myself. On Metro’s tab, I had a suite—though not bungalow—at That Hotel. Could look down from my window on its pool’s frescoes of paunchy gents toasting at rest, their sunglasses as declarative as a firing squad’s blindfold, among magnificent girls in Newton-defying bathing suits as waiters circulated and bellhops trotted out with plug-inable phones. While you won’t believe it, Panama, in those days a telephone’s status was indicated by its heft and Bakelite sheen, not its resemblance to a metal hangnail.

Appearing poolside myself, the Hollywood equivalent of a debut at the court of St. James, struck me as both unnerving and a bigger commitment than Pam’s signature on my Metro contract. I’d learned at Anzio, no less, that too much sun turned me freckled and peeling instead of gorgeously tanned, and the Buchanan gams were my only feature that gave me any hope of passing for suitable human scenery. Still, it was either that or binoculars, and after a week, having bought a demure but not wholly unchic tartan two-piece and my own shiny firing-squad blindfold, I wrapped myself in a hotel robe and went down.

No doubt it’s just Pink Thing’s archives having fun that I recall those with
The Naked and the Dead
on their laps looking up to trade competitive glares with those starting Irwin Shaw’s
The Young Lions
.
Having just about finished John Horne Burns’s
The Gallery
, I was rather bleakly thinking Napoli had kept a few secrets from the Bobbsey twins when a bellhop startled me by plugging in a phone next to my chaise. It was Gerson asking me to be his dinner date at the Gene Kellys: “I was supposed to be holding Lily Hellman’s hand. Not really her cup of hemlock, but Betsy Blair [then Mrs. Kelly] is doing
Another Part of the Forest
over at Universal and if you’re Lillian you tend the greensward. But she’s flying back East to nurse Hammett. Thank God,” he added decisively, careful to erase any insult I might feel at being asked so late.