Girl of My Dreams (6 page)

To Nils most of childhood was combat, and most of his bleeding was internal. His hemophilia was of a relatively moderate variety, yet when he played with other boys he was sure to come home with grossly swollen and excruciatingly painful joints. Knees, elbows, ankles, wrists were the worst. A contact sport sent him into agony as his blood flowed eagerly, inside his joints, to any bruised area. When he had to miss school because of pain, Nils read books about magic. “Anything to escape,” he told me. He was better with his hands than his sailmaking father, and he could make rabbits disappear for his dazzled school chums, some of whose parents thought it was the work of Satan. Nils had no respect for his father and something approaching hatred for his mother.

In 1914, when Nils was fifteen, he won a sleight-of-hand contest that gave him six weeks as a junior assistant to Houdini. Unlike Houdini's other assistants, all older and more experienced, Nils knew he could never become an escape artist or contort his body in any fashion. He practiced with cards, birds, ribbons and scarves up to ten hours a day. He described this as a preference, never telling Houdini or the other assistants about his hemophilia, which had begun to abate but would never permit him to twist himself into the human pretzel that was routine for escape artists.

From Houdini, Nils learned to make objects disappear and reappear elsewhere, to take the audience into his confidence, give them the impression they knew a trick as well as the performer, then with a whisk and a blinding hand-eye movement leave them astounded at how utterly they had been deceived. Nils told me a magician is really an actor playing the part of a magician. He acted his apprentice part so well that at the end of six weeks Houdini asked Nils to stay on as part of his retinue. Houdini liked to say great tricks are like unsolved crimes, and now Nils was learning to commit them.

Houdini took Nils to Hollywood where the peerless magician made several silent films, all disappointments. Chaplin tried to give Houdini suggestions to make his pictures more believable. Houdini insisted he had only to replicate what he did on a stage, but audiences did not buy this on the screen. For Nils it was all going to school.

After several years Nils felt he'd learned enough, and the master was becoming self-destructive. Houdini kept himself locked in a coffin under water for over an hour, which left him ill for days afterward, and he began doing something Nils found eerie. Some weeks Houdini would spend all his time exposing fraudulent mediums and spiritualists. “This was holy work to Houdini,” Nils said, “but to me it was breaking the proscenium. I love sham. It's why I became a magician. Audiences love it. It takes them away from the deeper shams and disasters of their lives.”

Within a year after going on his own, Nils was filling theaters from San Francisco to Savannah, seeing his name grow larger on posters. He could make anything vanish on one side of the stage and rematerialize on the other; he could cut one woman not into two but into six women, which brought audiences to their feet. He introduced himself theatrically, almost in a trance as he chanted his spell: “Hear me, O Spirits, in my torment. Numerals are the invisible coverings of human beings. We ask you to release us through numbers. Let every rope or strap, every knot be broken, every form of matter change its shape and location. Let identity itself multiply, for I am Nils Maynard but also Matheus von Bickenheim.”

Having borrowed the name of his despised mother, Nils would begin his tricks while explaining he needed his mother's noble heritage to invoke the powerful forces that would help him perform magic. The ancient von Bickenheim attachment to mathematics at Heidelberg resurfaced in a way his forefathers wouldn't have predicted but would recognize. He would turn one dove into four, one handkerchief into ten, and again and again one woman into six. He took a few prisoners from Houdini: Nils could make a trumpet leave one table and arrive instantly on another playing “Stars and Stripes Forever,” and he could throw four ringing alarm clocks into the air, make them vanish and reappear hanging from watch chains on the opposite side of the stage. When he had worked his way up to playing New York, Detroit, and Chicago in the mid 1920s, Nils was making eight thousand dollars a week and pocketing virtually all of it. He was free. He never spoke to Houdini again, nor would he see his mother, even when she tried to come backstage in Boston.

Nils tired of repeating himself. Unlike Houdini he was not a great showman craving adulation nor would his disease allow him to top himself with physical feats. But there was another form of magic Nils was certain he could do.

The magic of a magician was mundane compared with the magic of film—what is a severed rope restored to a single strand or a vanishing dove when stacked against prehistoric monsters or a leap from the wing of one airplane to another?—which is why Nils became a moviemaker. “Magicians like to believe they can defy the Creator by doing things no human has ever done,” Nils said, “but a filmmaker
becomes
the Creator by constructing his own world. It just takes him a little longer. Six days becomes twelve weeks or so.” Instead of imitating his former hero, Nils used the magic of the screen itself—cross-cutting, montage, close-ups, fade-ins, dissolves, special effects—to make people howl, to scare and amuse and reassure them, to make them weep over the salvation of an orphan or the redemption of a scapegrace. He began making pictures in the last days of the silents and managed a seamless transition to talkies.

After a successful adaptation of a hit play, Nils fumbled and made a few attempts at what he intended as intellectual pictures. An explorer goes to Tibet and finds his journey is philosophical rather than geographical. The dictator of a small country begins with ideals and is corrupted by power and privilege until his son, home from college in America, literally does not recognize his grossly bloated, bemedalled and brutal father. This was a decent moment but the picture itself, which Nils made for Jubilee, was a failure, stumbling over its own pretensions to political significance and moralizing. Louella Parsons, among others, brought Nils back to earth: “One of the brightest boys in our constellation of directors,” she wrote, “likes to go around town proclaiming that if pictures can talk they might as well say something. Fine and dandy, but he should remember the ringing declaration from the founding fathers of filmdom—if you want to send a message, take it to Western Union.” That was a message Nils heeded. A long time later Mossy told me had planted the item by calling Parsons himself. True or not, from then on Nils made entertainments.

When Nils finished disclosing his path into pictures to his fellow directors, Largo Buchalter, who hated to have anyone else hold forth, could only say, “Well la-di-da.” Nils realized Buchalter was about to start a new story about himself, belittling others. “I think,” Nils concluded slowly as he looked Buchalter in the eye, “that what meant the most for me in terms of freedom was to be famous and rich and still so young.” The bully braggart in the director's cluster had suddenly been outbullied and outbragged. Nils wasn't quite through. “Frank,” he said to Capra, “will you give me back my four of clubs?” He went around the circle naming the card each director had picked earlier. When he finished, Nils handed the deck to Largo Buchalter and told him to keep it. “Just in case you think it's marked.” To me, Nils was virtuous glamour.

A royal moment. The prince of melody descended the stairs. Dapper, double breasted in blue serge, dark hair lightly brilliantined. Teet Beale was at last intimidated—no ta-ra-ra-booms for this guy, any lyric would fall dead at his feet. Beale humbly bowed and said, “It's an honor to have you here, Mr. Berlin.” Irving Berlin nodded with a wisp of a smile and went to greet Palmyra. “Mr. Berlin,” she said, “I wish I were your sister in song, but I'm only your fourth cousin at least twice removed.” “Music is music, my dear,” said Irving Berlin, “and I'm happy to have you anywhere in the family.”

Blinded by my betters, I was wondering why Mossy was a phantom at his own party when suddenly I was slammed on the back. It was not Mossy, who did not do such things. Seaton Hackley, Mossy's henchman who played his part in Joey Jouet's final hours, was praising the
Doll's House
work I turned in that afternoon, which felt like the previous century. “A humdinger script,” he called it, forgetting it was only a treatment. He must have received it from Gershon Lidowitz already—Littlewits himself—and shoveled it up to Mossy, from whom he may have detected a passing blink of approval. “Love the way you solved the third act. Always had a soft spot for Torvald myself. Nice to give him the drinking problem, automatically makes him more interesting and justifies the wife leaving home, even taking the kiddies to her mother's while old Torvie promises to get off the sauce. She's not really abandoning her home that way. Leaves us with morality in the saddle and the prospect of a reunited family. You think Fred MacMurray is ready for Torvie?” Maybe, but he's not ready for Garbo, I didn't dare say. Garbo was the star they wanted for Nora though I'd heard Pammy was hoping she'd get the part.

Hackley's praise made me proud, with no inkling of how much more Ibsen would hate me than the other writers who did nothing worse than change his ending while I had triumphantly destroyed everything he meant in the play. I looked around for Lidowitz. Not here. He somehow didn't rate, yet I did. My moment of strut. Woozily, I took out my car keys and jingled them. Just to make some noise.

Haloed beneath a chandelier, with the self-possession of a nested starling, Pammy greeted people alone. Her honey-gold hair was now in a twirled mound at the top of her head—she re-coiffed in the powder room?—while the green diaphanous gown was both French and ancient Greek. She was classical
and
romantic. Was it possible?—yes, she'd begun working her way toward me. She must have heard about my coup at the studio; surely Seaton Hackley wouldn't have praised me without a nod from Mossy, a nod that had made the rounds. A disobedient strand of her upswept hair, straying from the rest of her coiffure, caught more light at the back of her neck. What would she say to me? Or I to her? Why could she come to me like this but I couldn't approach her? Or could I? The way of the pecking order: a junior screenwriter speaks when spoken to, ready with a bon mot. I wasn't.

I'd say, “You're looking even more ravishing than usual.” Naw, that's what a flit would tell her. Likewise I couldn't say how much I loved her in
The Many Lives of Theodosia
, a negligible effort by all concerned. Palmyra was getting nearer, greeting friends but drawing unrelentingly closer to me. How about just going with “Mossy really knows how to live, ha ha, you should see the main house.” Death. I was terminally abashed. Here she is. In two seconds I'll have to say something. No, oh.

In the last tenth of an instant, like a car swerving to avoid a crash, Palmyra angled—she had almost bumped into me—to kiss and embrace Simone Swan Bluett, who did her costumes on
Autumn Nocturne
. “Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight,” said Simone to Palmyra. Had Pammy been heading for her the whole time, then, or had she changed her mind as she approached me, deciding late in her sashay that her dresser was worth her time and affection while I was not?

“I told you, it's just dues,” said the reappeared Sylvia Solomon, patting my shoulder. Maternally, sisterly? I turned to her and said, “It's discouraging and I'm embarrassed that you noticed.” “Look,” she said, “be thankful you don't have to sleep with anyone to get around this town. It wasn't so easy for me. Though come to think of it, it wouldn't hurt if you found your way into the right bed here and there.”

How do you get into the right bed anyway, I did not ask as we were joined by Yancey Ballard and other writers. The angular Yeatsman stooped to my eye level. “Feeling isolated? It's good for the soul. I myself look forward to becoming a sixty-year-old smiling public man some distant day.” We screenwriters huddled, indeed grumbled, in a corner filled with a reproduction of Rodin's
Thinker
and another of a Greek god entwined around a goddess. Some of these writers were Hollywood notables making three thousand or more a week, some were notorious, some disappointed, some permanently hopeful, most suspecting they would be better people if they did something else. Novelists, playwrights, journalists: they'd all had what they now thought of as honest, if not sufficiently gainful, toil. Now they were in harness, overpaid, feeling they were debasing themselves before illiterates prior to being replaced by another of their species who would, in turn, also be replaced. Or else they were trying to be hired to be overpaid, debased, and replaced. Self-respect was not an attribute many of them had in excess.

A cocky thickset writer junior even to me, Mark Darrow, began babbling, perhaps from nervousness or drink. “I always start with a twist, a guy's told he has a fatal disease, or it's the night before a battle,” he said, “then I decide who should be in that plot point—a thief, surgeon, bunch of salesmen looking for dames.” Mark's wife grabbed his elbow and said, “Honey, please, these men have so much more experience.” But Yeatsman said, “That's fine, fine, but I like to start with someone I'm interested in, flawed of course, I think what's improvable about him, then I go further and think only what's provable. When I get to the provable I can start to write, and things will happen to him.” “No, no, no, that's entirely wrong,” said Mark Darrow as if he were his famous uncle Clarence rebutting the prosecution in a courtroom. “You have to have the gimmick first,” he went on, “like a coat hook so you can hang everything on it and the good guys—”

But now Yeatsman interrupted, having heard enough of Darrow's nonsense. “You know what's too bad?” he said. “What's too bad is the kids of this country being brought up by our pictures to believe crime doesn't pay or you shouldn't have sex till you're married, or—” And he was in turn interrupted by Sylvia Solomon, who said, “Now here's what we could do, folks, that the Hays Office morality police in charge of protecting youth from reality couldn't object to—we could make a picture about a hateful Hollywood executive, excuse the redundancy, who throws a party where everyone present loathes him for one reason or another and finally he is murdered while the party is still in progress—”