Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (8 page)

Odd sightings around the pool or on the Metro lot aside, that soirée was my introduction to Hollywood’s real trick photography: the kind taken by your blinking eyes as familiar screen faces turn 3-D. Yet in a variety of Beverly Hills and Bel Air homes that spring, sometimes as Gerson’s date and sometimes (I
had
written a bestseller) on my own, I noticed most of them were sheepish about these lesser selves, for lesser they indubitably were. Manhattan magnifies, Los Angeles shrinks; the difference is the sky. One reason actors like living there is that it lets them pretend they’re in proportion.

Male stars, especially, had overeager manners tinged by worry that a ringer like Pam might know truths fame had denied them about the complex mummery of behaving normally. As they waxed lyrical about tennis or havered after substance by subscribing to
Newsweek
,
retreating indoors to read it to demonstrate the indifference of an
homme sérieux
to May’s mesmeric soar, they seemed more victimized than even Murphy by masculine faith that a noble thing called “real life” existed out beyond this palisade of artifice, not a dichotomy to confuse most women in either Monte Carlo or Weehawken. It came out in questing, jousting grins and a positive mania for conversational premature ejaculation, as if guessing what you were about to say did more to prove their bona fides than putting up with listening to it. Not to smash any altars, but the one I’ve got most in mind is Bogart; I’ve never had so many perfectly passable remarks get brutalized before they were halfway out of my mouth by clackingly chopper-proud pseudo-savvy. (“Uh-huh! Those burp guns could cut a man in half.” Well, no: they were .30 caliber, not .50.)

Yet even the women were likely to worry you’d catch them out somehow, pointing in vindictive triumph (they could fathom no other kind) at the giveaway mistake—the tinsel!—in their otherwise convincing bean dip. At fame, all of them were experts. In ordinary situations, they were as touchingly unsure of whether to act snooty or abashed as centaurs at the Preakness.

Would you like to know the party game those silly, enchanting people were all sure defined them as regular folk, breaking the ice for newcomers? Charades! Trust me, oh, that’s just the thing to make you feel you’re on an even footing with Gene Kelly, in whose facially mobbed living room I once had to act out Milton’s “Come and trip it as you go/On the light fantastic toe.” But these were Hollywood’s great middlebrow years, when the vogue was to impersonate the Versailles edition of suburbia.

As always in movieland, one motive was fear. Though McCarthyism was years away from being coined as a term—by Herblock, incidentally, the
WashPost
’s op-ed Daumier; in Sean Finn’s pantheon, only Bill M. shares that plinth—and its eponym was still an obscure freshman Senator from Wisconsin, the House Un-American Activities Committee had reached L.A. a year before I did and the Hollywood Ten’s contempt convictions were still on appeal. Since Hollywood’s politics ranged from a balletic pink (the Kellys) to Kremlin red (Pat Carpet, by now as indigenous a transplant as most of Southern California’s flora), it made sense to take cover in aggressive normality.

His own teenage membership in Passaic’s small chapter (“More the size of a limerick, not that the Irish kids stopped throwing rocks”) of the Spartacist League now a wry memory—“It was mostly a way to meet girls,” he told me, which I knew wasn’t true but knew he wished had been—Gerson was well placed to be kind about it all. “When backing Wallace for President is a show of intransigence, you wonder what Norman Thomas must think,” he murmured one night, backing me in his Packard down a long driveway after we’d heard some drunken hyphenate lecture his shrunken caliphate about Henry’s good sense: the approximate equivalent of praising Nixon’s idealism. “Still, who am I to talk. Pam, can it be you’ve seduced me into voting for Truman?”

I got you another, Miss Loy. My big advantage was Harry’s decision, ignoring the State Department’s qualms—even Cadwaller, then unknown to me, had thought it was rash—to recognize the new state of Israel. Then we pulled up at That Hotel, where as usual Gerson’s goodnight was confined to the warmest of smiles.

He took me to parties; sometimes I even asked him. Unless driving time counts, however, we hadn’t gone out
à deux
since our French lunch. If I thought about it at all, I was operating on the assumption that our social life was purely professional, just as so much of Hollywood’s professional life struck me as purely social.

When I got to the office next morning, Wylie was recumbent but wakeful on the couch. “What do you know, Peg? They tossed it,” he said, nodding at our script. “Now can we get to work, please?”

Posted by: Celia Brady’s Sister

I hadn’t understood anything, since my impression was that once we gave Gerson what he’d asked for, that was the movie Seattle and Bangor would see. Yet even though he had some authority to acquire properties on his own, he wasn’t an
independent
producer: in lot parlance, a Metro gnome, not a Metro pasha. The pashas had read Wylie’s and my script and vied to mime “By the licking of my thumb, something wicked this way comes” at charades. In a sign he thought his authority could use shoring up—more often, he strolled in on us in the writers’ building unannounced, a gentler way of asserting it—our next confab with Gerson was in his office, not ours.

“Well! We had a good four months at least, you two. I’m proud of our work, but of course all good things must come to an end.” That was my first hint, confirmed by variants on the same template I saw from a wife’s vantage point on his later productions, that Gerson hadn’t been able to help urging Wylie and me to write the script we had to give himself the bliss of believing such a movie could exist. In fairness to him, you never knew: something might always slip in under the radar.

“Anyhow! We’re tag-teaming this. That’s the word from on high,” he told us. “Pam Buchanan, I’d like you to meet your new alter egos. Wylie, you must know them by now.”

Because some people’s faces hurl their legends at you even if their preferred publicity photo dates to 1922, I’d known as soon as we walked in that the plump dwarfess in platinum ringlets and kohl-rimmed kewpie-doll eyes on Gerson’s rich couch could only be Bettina Hecuba. Indeed my heart had kicked, since I had no idea what a big disappointment she’d be. (Short version: despite my best efforts, I never got Bettina to consider the possibility that I might be, well, Pam! Potential kindred spirit, fellow voyager. More Hollywoodized than her bubbly books let on, she had no interest in meeting anyone
like
her.) The man doing his best to make his share of the couch look like a pleasure boat’s flying bridge was another curdled old hand turned monkey’s paw, Claude Estee.

“Bettina, you’re the wizard.” Gerson’s lips crimped with what he later admitted—to me, not the room at large—was a renewed awareness she revolted him. “How do you see the problem?”

“This thing you’ve got here is a hemorrhoid that wants to be a trapezoid,” she said. “It’s all here, there, Anzio, whatnot, Paris, craziness, dead people we never met when they were vertical and cannot give a fig about. What I see is the old triangle. Bill and this Eddie, sure we change the names. Which one’s she going to end up with?”

“And we lose Italy,” Claude Estee said. “We get all three of ’em to Merrie Olde, then bang, on to France. Frolics ensue.”

“But that never happened,” I protested. “I only ever
saw
Bill in Italy. And Lord knows, we never—”

“Lesson One,” said Bettina, acknowledging me at last but only as an intruder. “Nothing. Ever. Really. Happened. If you ever say that to me again, you’d better learn to say it in Chinese. It’ll do as much good and you’ll have a new party trick when you head back East.”

“So who
does
she end up with?” Gerson asked. Though I was staring madly in all directions, I think I caught his eyes flicking away from me as he did. I was too squirmy about hearing her answer to pay much mind.

“We argued, but I like this Eddie. Reason? She and this Willie or Joe or whatever are the same age. Babes in the woods—wah, wah. Enough with the diapers. He can’t teach her much and what audiences like is a broad being taught. Eddie’s older, got more seasoning. I see Gable.”

“We aren’t quite at that stage yet,” said Gerson. “Anything else?”

“Yes. All these exteriors,” Claude Estee said. “I don’t know if you’ve even had this script budgeted, Noah—”

“No, we haven’t.”

From the “I knew it”
glances Claude exchanged with Bettina, I gathered this was an interesting admission. “You know it’s impossible,” Claude went on. “Primo, this ain’t
Birth of a Nation
.
Deux
, Bettina and me don’t do the great outdoors.”

“The goddam
war
was outdoors,” I protested. “What about the fucking
war?
”

“Kung pao, foo yong, chow mein,” crooned Bettina. “Chiang Kai-shek,” she added with relish.

“Lesson Two,” Claude informed me. “They know how that ended.”

“Damn right,” my neighbor guffawed. Wylie’d never pretended he had any loyalty to the script or to much but his paycheck.

“All right. There’s a lot more to do. But I think we’ve come to a meeting of the minds, as my dear wife would say.”

Once I knew Gerson better, I knew how he’d been suffering. With his passion for seeing history resurrected on film, you could say he was
fluent
in kung pao. He’d been forcing himself not to speak it to protect his position, and remember: the imaginary movie he’d gotten Wylie and me to write had meant more to him than to me. I’d already lived it, written some of it in
Regent’s
,
mocked some more of it in
Nothing
,
and profited all three times. Gerson was the purist, not me.

“This’ll work out, Pam,” he told me bravely. Also wrongly, but still. “I know it’s a lot for you to digest. But these three know what they’re doing.”

“Yeah, we do,” Bettina snorted in the polished corridor—to Wylie, I noticed, not Claude. “If he did, we’d all be in gravy.”

Posted by: Pam

“Who’s Gerson’s dear wife?” I interrupted Wylie as he started to brief me on our new subordinate roles the next Monday.

“You don’t know? Oh, of course you wouldn’t. Stella Gerson, née Negroponte. Older than him, I think—she was a publicist here for years. She was in Carole Lombard’s plane crash,” he said and looked impressed. “That crack of his was darker than I thought, and I’m good.”

“I thought Carole Lombard was in Carole Lombard’s plane crash.”

“So were twenty-odd other people, Peg,” Wylie reminded me. “That must make it hard on Gerson. I know it did on Stella’s friends. All over town, it was ‘Carole Lombard, my God! Oh God, we’ve lost Carole
Lombard
.’
Not that Carole Lombard, Carole Lombard, Carole Lombard didn’t deserve it. You know she was the best of us by miles. I know for a fact Stella G. thought so too.”

“Were you one?” I meant one of Gerson’s wife’s friends.

“Stella? I’d have sold her out in a handclap. But I did like her, yes. Sorry to see her go that way, her demotion to ‘among others’ in the papers the next day included.”

Having just spied a heel’s Achilles heel, I wondered if he’d say the same of me if I flew into a mountain with someone better known. Too bad Wylie White (d. 1980) has long predeceased me, his credits petering into sitcoms and silence in the mid-Sixties and his long Hollywood novel
unpublished.

Be that as it may, when Pam eventually laid eyes on a photo of the first Mrs. Gerson, I felt obscurely relieved we looked nothing alike. No mystery he’d cherished her, but my husband knew when people are gone. Her picture was right out in the open in our den. I saw no reason to move it.

I hadn’t come upon a locked room that held fifty more lit by tapers. I wasn’t urged to do my hair like her—and good luck
there
,
Antoine of Beverly Hills—or consider work as a publicist. I hope you share my relief, bikini girl, since it’d be a shame if I had to gum up what
l’équipe
hopes is a reasonably entertaining daisysdaughter.com post with that sort of drivel. It’s the bane of all Hollywood fiction, for all I know including
Lost Weekends Under the Volcano
.
Wylie never showed me a sentence.

As for our own sow’s purse from a cow’s ear, nearly all
Nothing Like a Dame
’s new script shared with its predecessor was its title. That eventually went too. Gerson did his best to look regretful when he told our quartet at one story conference that Rodgers and Hammerstein had pulled their considerable Hollywood clout to scotch the title despite Pam’s earlier copyright.

“Hey, fuck you, Richard. I got there first,” I muttered. “Are you really that possessive about your shirts?”

“I’m sorry, Pam?”

“Nothing. Nothing, like a dame.” Privately, however—yes, we were an item by then—Gerson and I agreed it was just as well. At least
The Gal I Left Behind Me
had no association with me.

The way tag-teaming worked was that Bettina and Claude, old monkeys’ paws at construction and Wylie’s and my bosses in all but name, would rough out a sequence and messenger it down the hall for us to tart it up into dialogue. Then they’d rework our version by plugging in road-tested jokes from their earlier movies, which plagued Wylie mostly because he didn’t have the stature to crib old jokes from his. Then they’d decide the whole outline was wrong, reshuffling scenes as carelessly as Imelda Marcos sorting shoes before they put us to work on new ones to fill the gaps they’d just created. Even granting
The Gal
was one of the worst movies of 1949, the wonder is that it wasn’t one of the worst of 1965.

I found Pam had a knack for claptrap, which possibly should’ve worried me but didn’t. (Youth is resilient, old age couldn’t care less. Middle age is doubt’s swamp.) The process had so little connection to anything I’d learned to call writing, let alone my own life, that I responded to it as a light-hearted transformational game. Soon I’d even learned to sling the one unanswerable argument in story conferences: “The audience will go for it.” Since nobody in Hollywood is an audience and no member of a real one believes himself or herself to be an interchangeable cog, what gave any of us a claim to insight beats me, but it was never challenged.

That said, I could still get three pairs of eyes to roll heavenward by betraying my ignorance of basic rules. And with no regrets, not in the case I’m thinking of. At one caffeine-fiendish meeting at which Gerson was present, Bettina, Claude, and Wylie were wrangling over the latest plot hole ripped open by tag-team genius, namely how to dramatize Chet Dooley’s discovery that Eddie Harting was The One writ purple in Peg Kimball’s heart. If nothing else, I was grateful my Anzio Bobbsey twin’s new cognomen was in place, as I had honestly cringed at hearing them all call him Bill. Even Gerson, whose voice I otherwise enjoyed.

Nor was I sorry Pam was now Peg, as Wylie had presciently christened me. Of the three of us—and by now I could hardly remember the kung pao that in the real ETO, Bill, Eddie, and I had never been a “we”—only Eddie had kept his first name, simply because everyone except me liked it. Anyhow, they were tossing around stupid ideas: for instance, a letter home to my “parents” Chet might guiltily read before posting it. I wondered briefly if it was worth turning Chinese to bring up the kung pao of a polo accident on Long Island and a Browning in Brussels.