Girl of My Dreams (19 page)

Elena told me that whenever Mossy referred to Pammy by her last name he was doing one of two things. Either he was disguising his own interest in her, or he was considering her as something between valued property and an artist, both of which, by studio standards, she was. I believed she'd be the perfect Nora in
A Doll's House
.

Driving to work that Monday morning, I was queasy about my visit to Pammy's Red Woods. I'd intruded, then failed her in a way I couldn't define but that was somehow tied to the ghastly package she received. The interlude with Jasmine/Janice redeemed my day with pleasure and confirmation. Though she was real enough to have left a lipstick, which I had no way of returning to her, she also had the quality of a phantom. I might pine for Palmyra—I often called her by her full name in reveries—but that didn't prevent me from being a twenty-four-year-old longing for a touch. The alternating current between dreams and reality in Hollywood during the Great Depression yielded such high voltage that the contradictory flows of energy made you dizzy. Almost every movie was in some way a denial of the Depression itself. The more famous a star, the more impossible it was to imagine the star affected by the Depression, even if he or she played the part of a pauper.

Movies and fame: what a perfect marriage, each dependent on projection. In the search for identity that was my Grail over these teeming months, I attributed divine powers to those whose prominence endowed them with a magical existence. What was a star's glamour anyway? Glamour was no less than the radiant moment extended and absorbed into personality. It became a defiance of inevitability, of time and death. It made up for something that wasn't there or that had been but had vanished. My wait for a portion of this existence, I assured myself as I approached the studio gates, was over.
A Doll's House
would attach me at least to a screenwriter's renown.

A vast moan arose from the waiting mass as I steered my roadster toward the guard booth at Jubilee. Hopeful and hopeless, patient and impatient, the dispossessed bunched around my car. Even more than with the stars, who they didn't dare bother, they implored anonymities like me to get them inside for a day's work. I had learned to ignore them, real people wishing only to become part of the fakery.

From Jubilee's gates, the studio looked like a dozen airplane hangars in a well-guarded penitentiary for high-risk repeat offenders. Inside was a miniature civilization with a caste system both rigid where authority was concerned and flexible when talent showed itself. A factory town with each filmmaking task having its own little company. I hurried to the green stucco building where non-starring actresses reported at 6:30 for makeup and costuming, 5:30 if they were going on location. Looking for the costume sweatshop Jim Bicker had described, I went to the top floor.

In a crowded cavern above the actresses' dressing rooms I counted twenty-eight coffee-skinned women, about half hunched over their Singers, the other half stitching by hand. One of them got up to see what I wanted. She was short and had the flat-nosed impassive features of Mayan sculpture. Her Spanish accent was so heavy I had to ask her to repeat several things. She said there were thirty-five sewing
muchachas
and some weren't in yet. They worked twelve hours a day and were paid forty cents an hour. They were not allowed out of the building or even downstairs. If anyone saw them they were told to say they were studio maids. “We send most what we make home,” the woman said, meaning Mexico. “To get enough to eat we need night jobs too, or husbands, but most husbands are on the other side. Some wait for us in Tijuana on Sunday.”

I'd heard of the women in the nineteenth century coming off farms to work as virtual serfs in the New England mills (the mills Nils Maynard and his boyhood friend had briefly run away to), and everyone learned in school about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 in New York, but this hot room was a page out of a history I thought was past. I judged the workers here to range in age from about thirteen to forty looking like sixty. “Our fingers fly all day,” my informal guide told me, “or we be fire. Fire by the Colonel.” They brought their lunches in the little brown bags I saw by each machine, and if they forgot or didn't have a nickel for a couple of tortillas, the Colonel would have leftovers sent in from the commissary, accompanied by a dock in the women's pay.

So this was another of Colonel DeLight's jobs, getting the Mexican women's fingers to fly the way he did with the writers, who also did piecework and could be bounced off the lot if their fingers didn't fly fast enough. But don't go too far with that one, I reminded myself, because all the writers have cars and some have pools and servants who are probably sisters of these women.

The women sewed all the actresses' clothing that wasn't bought or rented from Western Costume. Since Jubilee was lightly sprinkled with union sympathizers, Reds and Red-leaners in 1934, Mossy wanted this covey of serfs kept invisible. I wondered how Elena Frye felt about these women, if she even knew they were on the lot. And Pammy. Pammy couldn't have known because she'd have nailed Mossy if she had. The stars were dressed in their bungalows and seldom came to the wardrobe building.

“Looking for something, Sonny?” I turned and saw Colonel DeLight twitching his mustache at me from the top of the stairs. “Wandered a bit off course here, haven't we?” Slapping his pantleg, the Colonel beckoned me as he would a sheepdog and, like one of those loyally trainable creatures, I trotted over to his side. “Private quarters, Owen my boy,” he said, “no one comes up here without my say-so.”

Large boom-voiced courtly southern Colonel Ambrose DeLight was often playful in his husbandry of writers and liked to joke he was really only in charge of keeping them sober. “Ah'm jes' a towel boy in a whorehouse, gents,” he'd say as he walked down the hall. “Now you boys have all the fun you want, but no drinkin' around the typewriters between lunch and five-thirty, hear?” He'd be answered by a chorus of “Whatever you say, Massa,” which would set the typewriters to clacking furiously, and the Colonel would call out, “That's what I like—a good bunch of liars. Haw!” Or else, on a bad day when one writer's ego had been lanced by Mossy, two more had been fired, three others replaced, he'd yell, “Awright boys, enough gloom, le's have us some fun, what's post time for the first race at Santa Anita?” And off several of us would go, piling into the Colonel's ancient Hudson. “A heart has been located in his anatomy,” said his fellow southerner Yancey Ballard, “but it's fashioned from buffed ivory.”

I followed the Colonel down the stairs without looking back at the woman in the sewing cavern who'd been speaking to me. “Look, Colonel,” I said in the stairwell, “This is plain slave labor and you know it.” As soon as I said slave I remembered where the Colonel was from; he might not regard slavery unbenignly. He probably had a granddaddy who owned dozens of people. I added didactically, “These conditions are not what America tolerates in the twentieth century.”

“Wrong all day long, Sonny,” he said, draping a proprietary arm around my shoulder, “They ain't complaining, are they? And they ain't starving, are they? Which is what a lot of other wetbacks are doing in this year of Our Lord. So let it rest.”

“But this studio is rich, there are people here who take home thousands a week. The way you keep these women is cruel, and you and Mossy know that. It's not human.”

“Wrong again. That's just what it is. Human. Been some that has and most that hasn't since dawn broke over Noah's Ark. Now I'm heading back upstairs, you run along into the costumery here and see if you can get yourself a date for tonight. What you need is to have your ashes hauled, boy.”

Furious, helpless, I scuttled to my office to begin work on an original and wait for Mossy's triumphant summons on
A Doll's House
.

The morning was heating up in the throne room. Mossy began so calmly with his supervisors and flunkies they all thought it was going to be only a Monday morning preview of the week's work. Perhaps one of them, the conniving production chief Seaton Hackley, suspected a storm was percolating beneath the calm. Others present, the lineup of fugitive grotesques it took to run a studio, were the deceptively genteel assistant production head Wren Harbuck; the hatchet man Dunster Clapp, who had fired the gentle Joey Jouet; suave overeducated nasal-accented British turncoat Percy Shumway; Curtt Weigerer, the chunky head production manager, his jaw hanging like a clothes iron, a side of beef with the demeanor of a storm trooper; Goddard Minghoff, Mossy's amiable yet icy chief of staff; the yes-men Oddly Tumarkin and Dexter Twitchell; and Beeker Kyle, the villainous assistant studio manager who had been host to Jim Bicker when he first encountered Jubilee. These functionaries were a palace guard, variously capable of acting as modest ambassadors, jocular persuaders, or ruthless enforcers depending on what roles their maestro felt the situation required. When Seaton Hackley fired anyone his voice was like an oceanliner blowing a basso horn in a fog-shrouded harbor, while Wren Harbuck would steer someone off the lot sounding like an apologetic piccolo.

“Fine weekend everyone?” Mossy asked as he casually leafed a script.

“A little fun, a little work,” said Tumarkin. “Very little fun, whole lot of work,” said the suck-up Weigerer. It was Weigerer who kept the inventory on his office wall headed Rag Daze, a special calendar for charting the menstrual cycles of the important actresses on the lot; directors were warned not to make harsh demands, don't have them swim if they don't want to, during their periods. “As for me,” said the momentarily courageous Hackley, “enjoyed some time with the fam.” “Whilst I,” said Percy Shumway, betook myself to Arrowh—”

“Good,” Mossy cut in, “and did anyone chance to hear from Bernard Gestikker?”

“Bernard Gestikker?” said Wren Harbuck. “Who in the world … ?” “Gestikker?” said Dexter Twitchell. “Bernard?” said Oddly Tumarkin, whose first name Grszoddl no one, including he, ever used.

“Oh sure, Chief,” said Hackley, “that's Trent Amberlyn's real name before you changed it.”

“That's nice, Shmuel, you win the quiz,” said Mossy to his head of production, who had been born Shmuel Himmelfarb not far from Mossy himself in the Bronx. Seaton Hackley knew a hurricane was about to hit when Mossy used his original name. “All right,” Mossy continued. “Let's start over. Has anyone heard from Trent Amberlyn?”

Head shaking all around. “Not me, Boss.” “Nor I.” “Saw him at your colossal splash Saturday night,” said Wren Harbuck, proud of his own little splash when he waltzed in from the garden with the starlet Hana Bliner. “Haven't seen him since.” “Not a peep.” “Me either,” rounded out the chorus of yes-men saying, for a change, no.

“How happy, how blessed, for all of you.” Mossy paused, then let the storm break. “Trent God Damn Amberlyn is in the Hollywood lockup!”

“Whaaaaat?” Unbelief all around, insincere unbelief acted with as much flatulent insincerity as these bottom-feeders could muster.

“Soliciting a minor,” Mossy went on. “Who was no doubt soliciting him and who Trent probably thought was eighteen or so but turned out to be only fifteen. A parking lot off Hollywood Boulevard on Las Palmas up near Franklin, cops happened to be patrolling it same time Trent was, ect ect ect, goddam treacherous little pansy ain't dried shit without Jubilee, how could he do this to me!”

This was not about Trent then. It was Mossy whose dignity was affronted. Mossy purposely used street grammar when he was upset, and ect was et cetera.

Open season on Trent. Dunster Clapp and Curtt Weigerer set the tone when they both said “vicious little cocksucking queer” at the same time. The rest chimed in with their poofs, flounces, wrists, any slurs they could come up with to condemn Trent. “Someone that light in his loafers should know his way around,” said Goddard Minghoff, Mossy's gatekeeper and the gentlest of his executioners. It was quipped around Jubilee that you had to go through God to get to Mossy; a producer wishing to gain favor at the studio tried to get God on his side first. In the present crisis, God added helpfully that he would look into the morals clause in Trent's contract, shouldn't be difficult to fire him.

“I see,” said Mossy. “So you all agree it's capital punishment for Trent?”

“Any queer has it coming to him,” said the malevolent Curtt Weigerer, his face the blunt side of an ax. “Tar and feather the little fairy.”

“Is that so, Curtt?” said Mossy. “And just what does Jubilee have coming? Trent Amberlyn has millions of fans and is worth more millions to this studio. You're all so far off the point. The point is how dare not a single one of you know where our stars are?”

“Boss, it was a weekend—”

“Oh, that's right, scandals don't happen on weekends. Remember Fatty Arbuckle? Blockheads! I expect you to know where our talent is at all times. Now Trent is still down there when he should have been bailed within two hours of his arrest. He's been there all night, and we can be sure someone from the
Times
, the
Examiner
or
Variety
will be at the jail within half an hour, maybe all three plus the
Reporter
. Weigerer, you have cop friends, Shmuel you know the detectives, get to them right away. And the rest of you—I don't want any of you overpriced baboons
ever
not to know where our stars are. If somebody does land in a lockup, you get them out of there within an hour,
half
an hour. Always have cash ready for bail even on weekends,
especially
on weekends. Does any of you dopes not get this straight?”

“We all get it, Boss,” said production chief Hackley, suddenly a spokesman for the chastened chamberlains. We let you down, and—”