Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane (9 page)

“Oh, shut up, all of you,” I said instead from the couch. I’d taken over Wylie’s recumbent posture, since around Bettina and Claude he sat up. “Why can’t he just spot me coming out of Eddie’s room the night the Bulge starts?”

Not to pat myself on the back, but silencing Bettina Hecuba was no job for an amateur. Or maybe one
only
for amateurs. “For God’s sake, Pam!” said Gerson. “We can’t even hint you were fucking.”

Unlike me, he wasn’t foul-mouthed. Indeed I rarely heard him use the word in the all-purpose and flavorful adjectival incarnation that all of us this side of Omar Bradley had learned to deploy in the war. He was just respecting convention. Except possibly in private, “fucking” was all anyone in Hollywood called sex.

I sat up. “Jesus Christ, that’s all we ever
did
do. Kung pao, foo yong, chow mein,” I added, whirling on Bettina. “Chiang Kai-shek! Chen-chen,” which didn’t quite come out of nowhere: those kewpie-doll eyes had just reminded me of the Lotus Eater’s. Then I saw my future husband’s face.

So, I’m afraid, did everyone else. And—“I’m sorry, Gerson,” I said witlessly. “I thought you knew.”

Was it his inadvertent declaration or mine that settled things? We often tenderly bickered about it. In any case, that night Gerson asked me to dine
à deux
for the first time since our French lunch: at Musso & Frank’s, later our marital favorite, which incidentally proved he had no intention of keeping us under wraps. His goodnight gesture was a dry but lengthy kiss.

A couple of days later, in my suite at That Hotel, kisses were succeeded by mutually shy—we mostly kept it under wraps—but satisfactory fucking. Yet the gesture this old bag still holds in her heart is that Gerson didn’t propose until after
Variety
announced the next spring that
The Gal
was a box-office bomb.

Posted by: Pam

After thinking Seattle and Bangor had a rare treat in store, I’d almost forgotten the goal of all this nonsense was to ship something to theaters. Hence my surprise when one day that fall—the temperature doesn’t drop, but everyone can feel summer’s bored air lift and go bother Ecuador, taking its shed snakeskin along and leaving a tenderer shimmer behind—our tag-team quartet’s latest wad, chartreuse by now in Metro color-coding, came back with the pashas’ magic endorsement: conditionally approved for production.

“It’s just another movie now,” said Gerson with a hint of reprieve. Cigaretted and bare-chested, his body paler than Pam’s was by then, he was still hopelessly, sniffably, uniquely, and hence adorably Gerson. “I’m sorry, Pammie. You’re well out of it.”

“I’m through? Pink-slipped? Time to start packing my bags?” Meet my first unmistakably Hollywoodized thought: unless I wanted to start footing the bill for this suite myself, we’d have to find someplace else for our fucking.

“Oh, you and all this are still on the budget. So’s Wylie. That is, I convinced the pashas to renew his contract.”

“You know he’s a wreck, don’t you?”

“Everyone does and him better than most. But I owe him for when Stella died. He identified—well, whatever was left. If I had, I’d still be gibbering.”

A passenger on a plume of cigarette smoke, a rare ghost of mangled Stella Gerson, née Negroponte, curled upward to rejoin Carole Lombard. Then it dissipated. “Chen-chen,” Gerson said.

Plucked from Pam’s memories in story-conference extremis, the cry to the dealer to start the next game was already one of our codes. “Chen-chen,” I murmured back.

True to its Chinese nativity, its meaning altered with inflection too. “Oh, Pammie! Do I have time?”

“You’d better make some,” snuggling Pam told his ear. So tucked and folded, corpuscle-crammed, peculiarly and proudly vulnerable. So oddly like the anus in reverse of our brains’ publicly displayed, disgustingly exposed digestive systems. To spare you any more detail regarding the images that used to pop into Pam’s mind unprompted, see Tim Cadwaller, “The Holocaust as Pornography,” in
You Must Remember This
.
His not unastute guesswork makes a natural sequel to the chapter that precedes it, “The Holocaust as Sacrament.”

Not least because I kept such Hieronymian bosh from Gerson, a few pink slipups over the years aside, the fucking was satisfactory. “Oh! You should know,” he said with a proud chuckle as he dressed. “This is mildly interesting. I think we’ve cast you.”

They had, but I didn’t meet the young New York stage actress recruited to play Peg Kimball until her wardrobe tests. It was the moment when the phoniness turned real and kung pao fled for good.

We were supposed to pose together for a studio photographer. Turning a corner, I ran head-on into a sparkling gal in the identical correspondents’ uniform I’d worn in the ETO, from cunt cap and shoulder flash to constantly tugged skirt and low-heeled, slightly clunky pumps.

I think they’d cheated on the stockings; ours were never that sheer. More saliently, I’d never had a nose that daringly darling, lips as ripe, or eyes anything so radiant. My blue-gray ones were attractive, but they were weather, not live gems, and Antoine would go to his grave unable to convert my brindle mop into her shiny bob. She was also a good few inches shorter than me, making her, I suppose, Peg Kimball’s exact height.

“Oh, I know it’s confusing!” she said with a silvery giggle, perhaps aware the claim flattered me. “Let’s get ourselves sorted out here and now. We’re both
Peg, but you’re Pam. And I’m Eve.”

As I hope my readers if any appreciate, I try to avoid cliches. Still, they really do say this in Hollywood: “We’re ready for you now, Miss Harrington,” someone called.

Yes.

Posted by: Eve Harrington’s Pal

Yes, though my dearest Hollywood friend’s biographers generally hurry past her flop screen debut—often casually indicting Gerson, to both Pam’s and Eve’s fury, as the hack that gentle man wasn’t.
The Gal I Left Behind Me
was the movie she outraged Broadway by coming West to make mere days after she’d collected The Theatuh’s prize trophy for starring in
Footsteps on the Ceiling
.
Given
The Gal
’s reception, it’s astounding she didn’t bolt back to the stage by the next train.

As movie fans know, she didn’t. From her saucy success in Red Ridingwood’s film of
Footsteps
and then Charles Eitel’s
Saints and Lovers
to her haunting job as abandoned Queen Disa in John Wilson’s much Oscared adaptation of Shade’s marvelous
A Distant Northern Land
,
her career after
The Gal
was all mistletoe and laurels. Contradicting the fables told against her in New York, she never once except teasingly reproached Gerson or me for making her screen debut such a dud.

Out of touch with Addison DeWitt since I’d come West, I hadn’t even known he was married to her, an eyebrow-raising break with form for him. But I was delighted when he came out to the Coast himself and they set up housekeeping in the hills above Malibu. Unabashed at living off his wife’s earnings—“Good Lord! So did God,” he crowed, flourishing a hand at our dazzling surroundings—and amusing himself by sporting atrocious Hawaiian shirts in their sun-medallioned garden as he chatted with servants in the most debonair pidgin Spanish I’ve ever heard, he tucked cigarette holder in mouth and went back to writing the taut, spiky poetry he’d begun with, producing three slender books critics called almost Shadean as well as my second-favorite memoir after
The Producer’s Daughter
,
the jaunty
An Apple for My Eve
. By the time he died in ’72, prompting his wife’s retirement from pictures, I doubt most people even knew he’d once been Manhattan’s silkiest, nastiest drama critic.

He was still back in New York, bracing his bride via bouquets and telegrams, when
The Gal
finally sneak-previewed in Glendale on April 14, 1949. As I’ve said already, it’s a miracle my friendship with Eve survived. Unlike, as I’ve also said already, mine with Bill M., not that Bill was on hand. I’m not sure when or where he saw it, but his letter about Chet Casanova’s etchings only reached me in July.

I’d never seen
The Gal
myself until Glendale, and so help me I had no idea Chet Dooley would come off as such a pusillanimous fink. An initially charming one, true, with an engaging line of boyish patter, but only because Peg Kimball was a ninny. Even after tag-team genius had started prepping Chet to come off second best in The Gal’s maturing affections by concocting an unreliable streak, I’d gone on picturing, well,
Bill
, who had no more duplicity than an M-1 and couldn’t even be shrewd without his eyes reaching out to pull you into the fun. Then you could enjoy his shrewdness as boyishly as he did.

Besides, on my one visit to the set when Hal Lime and Eve had a scene together—a dozen feet of mocked-up Normandy farmhouse behind them, live chicken whose trainer was clucking and flapping his elbows just outside camera range—Hal had looked about right and been personable. His slap of Pam’s face the night of
A Clock with
Twisted Hands’
premiere had briefly retraced itself in our gazes. Then we mutely agreed the actor who’d belted me was a Hal he’d left behind him.

The problem was that I had gotten so used to the Hollywood trick photography of seeing actors in three dimensions that I’d neglected how different their effect could be in two. Hal was well on his way to specializing in seductive weaklings with a gift of gab. Unfairly, since he’d only been doing his job, I never could cotton to him much after seeing how expertly he’d worked out Chet Dooley’s libels of Bill.

During the first reel or two, I hadn’t paid much attention to the fact that I was watching a dull botch. However far it strays from kung pao, it’s fun to see your life impersonated, and I snorted at not only a tired character actor’s pretense that he was Roy Charters but at a bookless office Roy wouldn’t have given
Regent’s
janitor. When Eve minced onscreen, I couldn’t help but be bewitched by the fantasy that those were
my
self-frisking hips, my life-welcoming lips, my cuddly new bosom, my hair and my voice. Regarding the actual Buchanan bod in Glendale’s fuckless aftermath, I realized Pam’s enchantment had had its painful side.

Like the monkeys’ paws at construction they were, Claude and Bettina had made Eddie Harting a veteran writer at the same mag who treated The Gal with derision in the opening scene. Announced with a brazen final quip, his departure for the looming Second Front was what provoked her to barge into the faux Roy’s office in an “Ooh, I’ll show
him
” snit and lobby for her own ticket to the ETO ball. A far cry from my own jump out of a Charybdean frying pan after my divorce from Murphy, but no facsimile of my bullnecked first hubby—much less Dottie Idell!—marred the screen. As far as the audience knew, Peg Kimball went to war a virgin. Kept her bloody cherry for a good ten seconds after the fadeout too.

In the third reel, Chet Dooley turned up, introducing himself in a London blackout—Peg’s, from brandy—with “Yep, I just got back from Anzio”: Claude and Bettina’s one concession to kung pao. When Hal Lime smirked as he said it and I heard titters at the wolfish undertone, I whispered aloud, “No, no.” Every scene from then on with him in it had me writhing and sick.

Only upchucking in Technicolor all over Bettina’s toupee (she was the toadstool sitting in front of me) would’ve done justice to my feelings about Chet’s farewell to The Gal and
The Gal
.
As rear-projected Sherman tanks rolled by silently (!) in the background—all out of proportion, but that was kung pao—he passed Peg Kimball a snapshot of his wife and baby. Just what Bill had done the first night at Nettuno,
a bit of business I knew had been nowhere in any script from cream to chartreuse. Couldn’t begin to guess—oh, yes I could: Wylie was the one who got summoned to set to troubleshoot in emergencies—how it had ended up onscreen.

No longer an up-front announcement of his marital status to ease the long-legged newcomer’s anxieties, it was now a confession. It was Chet’s guilty way of indicating he was taken and had led The Gal on. Then Hal Lime wandered away to be soundlessly flattened, so I hoped, by rear-projected Shermans, freeing Eddie and me to frown briefly at Dachau or rather
“dachau”
before our VE-Day confession of love.

Nobody in the lobby could’ve been stupid enough to interpret the tears ruining my face as praise. Gerson was uneasily chatting with two Metro pashas; he reached for my arm, but protocol stopped him from following. His back to them but nonetheless self-destructively, Wylie was raising a flask to his mouth like a bugle. Meanwhile, the civilians—as even I had gotten into the thoughtless habit of calling them—were reaching for the comment cards like Italian women about to hack up a still living horse.

Oleaginously, Hal Lime was trying to edge in between the two Metro pashas poking Gerson. Eve was nowhere to be seen and told me weeks later she’d fled before Normandy. “You know what we say, Pam,” called out Walt Wanks, the bullfrog in a turtleneck who’d played Eddie Harting without much interest in the job. “There’s always the next one.”

“Not for me, Dub. Tell Gerson I’m leaving, willya?”

Posted by: Pam

When Gerson, normally not one to pound, pounded on the door of my suite in That Hotel, his face mixed relief with outdated panic. He’d thought from Dub’s message I was leaving Los Angeles, had had to endure many more minutes of lobby autopsy before he dashed after me. We had a long hug while he mumbled healing-sounding things to me and I did the same back.

“Chen-chen?” he asked, still mildly worried. We both knew fucking wasn’t in the cards, and yet we’d never slept in the same bed without it. Nor was either of us in any shape to acknowledge that doing so would set the seal on our domesticity, though you’ll soon read proof I’d intuited it.

“Chen-chen, Gerson, but—what? You know, how?” What would happen once
The Gal I Left Behind Me
had been pushed out to sea in flames had never been discussed.

“We’ll work on that later. But I told the desk to put the room bill on my personal account from now on.”

After some surprisingly awkward undressing (baring the Buchanan bod from habit, I turned to see a constrained Gerson in T-shirt and boxers; except after sex, he didn’t sleep nude, and in his own home favored striped pajamas of a vaguely European type), he was off to slumberland by express train. Remember, he’d had a more exhausting night than I. His hour with the Metro pashas in Glendale had forced him to fake a confidence not only untrue to his feelings but insidiously confirming their opinion of
The Gal
. Only outright belligerence—impossible!—might’ve worried them into wondering whether he was right and they wrong.

Oddly moved to realize I’d never watched Gerson fall asleep before, I sat beside him. Even reached out to experiment with stroking his hair, then pulled my hand back as if burned when I recognized which bond I was parodying. As for Pam, despite the fact that I’d hardly been in the mood either, going fuckless left me sleepless. After a prowl or two around the suite—discovered there was nothing interesting to see on its prototype TV set, a.k.a. the bathroom mirror—I parted the curtains and looked down at the pool. At this late hour, of course it was deserted.