Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane

by Carson, Tom

  “Who, Eddie? Oh, Floyd! That fraud? He probably won’t even be in the script. Not that anything is for sure yet. Even me, so help me! Honestly, Bill, you wouldn’t believe this place.”

  Prescient words, though I didn’t know The Gal would end up skipping not only Floyd Young but Anzio. No correspondents’ villa, no alternately wary (something might happen) and riotous (something had and here we still were) trips up to the First SSF’s dugouts along the Mussolini Canal. And definitely no “The Angel of Anzio,” the title of my March 1944 Regent’s attempt to resurrect the laughter and efficiency of one of the three American nurses killed by a direct hit on their hospital tent in early February.

  We’d all hoped the front-line troops wouldn’t hear, but there were no secrets on that beachhead. One look at a map would tell you why. Unlike the front-line troops, correspondents could get back to Naples for a break whenever it got to be too much or our deadlines piled up.

  “Shit. I like it because I don’t need to,” Bill said now, meaning Hollywood.

  “Oh, me neither. All this is fun, but I can’t wait to get back to real life.”

  “That’s funny,” he said with a slightly Darnellized grin. Roguishness, which I first took his mood for, made him look even younger—and in fact, cub though I’d been in the ETO, Bill spotted me a whole year. What had evened us up into temporary twinhood was that he was my elder in combat.

  “Why, pray?”

  “Aw, hell, Pam. When you used to tell me bedtime stories about the ritzy life in Manhattan, you know what it sounded like? One hint: not a play. Bragginham Murphy or no Bragginham Murphy.”

  “A movie,” I guessed.

  “On the nose. Now I’ve met those people—Jesus, have I—and I keep wanting them to be your old movie. You know? Indulge me, you stupid bastards, what’s it to you? Here’s a nickel, I got plenty.”

  “Well, you earned them. I—”

  “No, no. Sorry, that’s a whole different rant. The deal is, they’re all listening to me ramble on, and to them the war’s the goddam movie. Is that just how the whole works works from here on in?”

  “How which works works?”

  “Everything. One man’s newsreel is another man’s musical, and never the twain shall meet. Where’s Linda Darnell, anyway? I’m empty.”

  “Well, of course I left out the boring parts back then. I’m a writer.”

  “I mean the whole house of cards,” he said stubbornly. “In Italy, at least I could—no, fuck that.”

  “Fuck what, pray?”

  “The minute I start thinking the war was the one true part, you know what I’ll be? I’ll be obscene. I’ll be more disgusting than Georgie Patton. At least he thought it was wonderful while it was going on. Uh-uh, Pammie. Let’s talk about something else.”

  “I’m trying, but I’ve only been here a month.” With some interest, Bill’s eyes waited for me to clarify whether I was being sharp with him. So I said, “Shit, I haven’t even slept with Lassie yet.”

  “Uh-uh. I get Lassie. You get Rin Tin Tin. We’re the goddam Bobbsey twins, and I ain’t gonna be the one to shock our public.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, suddenly hilarious on all eight cylinders. “Your kids’ll look like—”

  “What?”

  But I’d changed my mind about that joke (“dogfaces”) and pointlessly said, “Ronald Reagan.” Bill only thought it was funny because he’d made up his mind it was going to be.

  It’s hard to explain these delicate shoals, Panama. Whatever The Gal made of us, Bill and I really had stayed chaste as siblings during the war. Now peacetime was turning us into ex-adulterers, anxious not to spoil our reunion by reawakening the ghosts of rutting. Just as well we were interrupted—and by an expert on these matters, too.

  “Vy, Beel!” a tall voice said. “Sergeant, I haven’t seen you since Alsace. And such a nasty cartoon that was, with only the officers at the stage door! There were millions of you poor boys, millions. I did what I could.”

  Our four eyes crept up the ETO’s best-known human Christmas tree. Old enough to be our mother too, and Miss Dietrich was acting it even if she didn’t look it. “Vot are you doing in this awful place?” she scolded.

  “Uh, just having a bite. Then we stayed on. Hic and all that. Say, aren’t you here too?” Bill rather timidly asked.

  “Not Chasen’s! This room—this booth. You are in Poughkeepsie. Didn’t you tell Dave who you are?”

  “Marlene, I don’t know who he is either. It just seemed sort of sensible to keep it mutual.”

  “So vy didn’t you do something, then?” As the female, I’d been promoted to accountability. “But ach, my manners! I’m so magnificently sorry. Who are you?”

  “This is Pammie Buchanan,” said Bill. “She covered the ETO for Regent’s. We spent a while dodging shells at Anzio together. Shit, we probably should’ve still been collecting them. The she-sell, seashell kind, I mean.”

  Once Miss Dietrich heard I’d been to the war, like her, she softened. Then brightened, Rockefeller-Center-of-attention-style: “Oh, yes! Yours was Nothing Like a Dame. I remember. Excellent title, that’s why I bought it.”

  “My God, if I’d known you were—”

  “No, no! It was such a pleasure—such a luxury, Miss Buchman—to read one book about the damn war that wasn’t personally autographed. Finally, my real opinions could leap out, pawing here and goring there. You’ll forgive me, won’t you?” As if producing a diamond-bearing rabbit from a top hat, she held out a deal-sealing hand. “I didn’t know you were so young.”

  Mesmerized, I watched my own ringless fingers vanish. “Until now, neither did I,” I said. “I sure admire what you did, though. I know they hate your guts for it in Deutschland.”

  Did they ever, and they haven’t stopped. However long she’d been away, those newsreels of their Marlene entertaining our GIs must’ve made them feel even Father Christmas had changed sides.

  “Hoo! Ask a German what he loves and you’re inquiring about his pastimes. Ask him what he resents, and…but didn’t we meet once back then, Miss Buchman? Maybe London, maybe Luxembourg. I think you look familiar.”

  “Oh, it’s—possible, I suppose,” I chirped, winning a snort of delight from Bill. “I’m prac’ically positive I’ve seen you somewhere before too. No, we honestly never did. But thank you.”

  Thank you? My, oh, my. “Ah! Too bad,” said Miss Dietrich. “There weren’t so many of us over there. I loved the boys, I loved the boys! Still, sometimes one does want to pull down the shades on the candy store and drink one’s cocoa in peace. You must’ve known Janet Flanner, though.”

  Kind of her to offer a substitute, don’t you think? But Bill and I were still so stupefied we hadn’t even asked her to sit down.

  “No, I never met her either. A nice editor did tell me once my writing sounded a bit like hers, but of course it did! It’s called imitation—knowing who your betters are.”

  “Then we are different. In my case, I wouldn’t have the faintest curiosity. Or belief. But Beel!” she cried as if she’d just arranged for him to reappear from somewhere now that I’d been scooted back to kindergarten. “Tell me, how much longer do we have you in town?” Ah, the Hollywood “we.”

  “I’m getting on a train to Taos Thursday morning.”

  “Oh, family?”

  That was me asking, since Miss Dietrich probably didn’t know Bill hailed—had hailed?—from New Mexico. He’d told me a lot about it in conversations longer than any I bet he’d had with her in Alsace.

  He shook his head. “Book club.”

  “Such a pity,” Marlene groaned. “I have a sneak preview. Usually I stay home and do the ironing, but this one I made with Wilder. We are both alte Berliners, so we know the little lies stuck on at the end don’t matter.”

&nb
sp; “They did in Berlin,” Bill pointed out. “And they were kind of big, and—stuck on at the beginning, and—where was I?”

  “No, no! It’s a comedy. We shot there too, it’s nothing but rubble and big masonry eyes. Anyhow you might have liked it.”

  “I still could,” Bill said. “Hell, I still can, can’t I? Even if I pay for my ticket?”

  “Now you’ll be making me weep. Bill, you must absolutely flee this place. Miss Buchman, will you please see he gets on his train? We don’t deserve him. Only the poor dogfaces did.”

  No doubt it’s only in my imagination that she receded inside a giant soap bubble, beaming “Adios” to us both. Since otherwise the silence might’ve lasted until Dewey defeated Truman, I said, “Why, that’s odd! Marlene didn’t seem a bit worried about me being corrupted by Hollywood. Do you think she knows something we don’t?”

  “Sure of it,” Bill mumbled. “Pammie, be honest. Doesn’t all this ever seem bizarre to you?”

  “I think I’ve got the advantage of you there. Never had a normal.” I thought I was joking until his helpless nod made me wonder whether, by raising me so wrong, dead Daisy had equipped me right. Since I didn’t want to give her credit, the vaudeville routine went on: “They split my atom in the cradle. I remember Einstein saying, ‘Goo-goo.’ He looked so funny in his polo outfit! I’m sorry, Bill. Something’s really bothering you.”

  “Oh, Christ, I don’t know. Bothered? Sure, bother me with Marlene Dietrich, and lobster and hotel keys. Try that line out on the guys in the foxholes. I’m luckier than an Irishman with a dentist.”

  “It wasn’t luck! It was talent. My God, was it talent. And they aren’t in foxholes anymore, so there.”

  “Nope. They’re in graves and I made a bundle. Time put those two jokers of mine on the cover while I was still drawing sergeant’s pay. What was every other GI hoping to come home to if he didn’t get his ass shot off? God willing, a wife; God willing, a job. And we got the bestseller list. Pammie, help me out! I’m sorry, but there aren’t that many people who would know. Don’t you ever feel shitty?”

  “When I compare your book to mine, you’d better believe I do.”

  Some author Bill was, since he just looked annoyed. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know, but leave it be. Leave it be,” I repeated, a locution Pam had never used before. “They had their job, we had ours. And you could have gotten your ass shot off lots of times. So could I have once or twice.”

  Beyond him, Chasen’s was up to its favorite conjuring trick. The opening door’s brief reminder of prosaically (!) sunlit Beverly Boulevard revealed that what we’d been lulled into taking for a homey setting was a den of specially lit vaults, its human swag briefly caught in the act of getting up to visit other money. By now, however, even the draftsman in Bill wasn’t interested.

  “You weren’t in the Army, remember? I was. If you’d gotten killed, it would’ve been an accident. Just an awful, horrible, awful fucking not supposed to happen, like the nurses. We’d have felt lousy for, I don’t know, maybe a week. A week, Pam! You know what that means.”

  “Sure I do, Bill. All this flattery is making me dizzy.”

  I wished he hadn’t mentioned the nurses, and not only because—along with lots of other things that didn’t fit the tone—they’d been left out of Nothing Like a Dame. Nor was I sure Bill had ever read “The Gates of Hell,” by Pamela Buchanan’s report from Dachau, whose most opportunistic stratagem he’d have seen right through and probably been offended by. Leave it be, leave it be: I was a writer.

  “Just listen, will you?” he said. “For me it’s the other way around. The Army thought it was getting another rifleman, more meat for the grinder. But even my Purple Heart was for a scratch—and here I am. Guess who I owe it to? Maybe I even met the guy. Then I tooled back down the road in my little jeep and he got it instead.”

  “This is the stupidest horseshit I’ve ever heard in my life,” I told him, an exaggeration that would’ve had Murphy beaming at his unwarranted reprieve. “Instead? Everyone could’ve been anyone, you know it. Guilt is a form of vanity.”

  “Sure is,” he agreed with an aplomb that told me the charge’s only surprise was that it was conversational, not internal. “Because there’s always that other little voice. You know it.”

  “I’ve got lots of voices, Bill.”

  “It’s the one that keeps saying, ‘That was the best of it. You’re done. At twenty-six, kiddo, you’re done. Drink up.’”

  “Well, you aren’t. And even if you were, so’s Goya.”

  “That’s funnier than you think. I didn’t know what my book was turning into back home—I mean here—until some egghead attacked me in an art magazine. Now, he kept bringing up Goya: ‘Los Desastres,’ you know. Point was I’d given folks a sort of Uncle Remus war, because Goya had headless torsos in trees and I never drew one corpse.”

  “Why, that’s absurd,” I said, not least since I’d never realized he hadn’t. And I knew—and I know—Bill’s cartoons by heart.

  “Well, I’m a pretty simple boy. Being unfavorably compared to Goya still felt like a heady brew. But I did think about it, account of Whacksmith sounded so sure, and right or wrong I told myself, ‘Same subject, buddy. Different jobs.’ Goya had to show people what war really looked like, didn’t he? The guys I was drawing for already knew. They didn’t need that—from me.”

  “Uh-huh. And if you’re curious, you just told me what’s eating you.”

  “Besides Linda Darnell not coming back, you mean? I was really just trying to kill some time.”

  “Oh, I know that. Heaven forbid we should pretend you matter, Bill—to you, to—me or to anyone. But it isn’t about coming back in one piece, all right? Or even making a bundle.”

  “Can’t make you feel sorry for me, huh?”

  “Wrong again, because I do. Bill, Bill! I’m so smart it’s scary. Marlene was right too, only I got distracted.”

  “That’s what she’s for. That’s the formula.”

  “Listen!” I commanded, exhilarated by my prowess at being maternal or perhaps only sisterly. Though not a twin, for that had been a battlefield promotion revoked by Bill’s talent. “What’s gone wrong is you can’t love them anymore.”

  “Can’t love who?”

  “Whom. You can’t love the guys in the foxholes the way you did when they were in foxholes now that they aren’t in foxholes, and it’s driving you crazy. You can be as good as anything, you can draw until your fingers bleed, and you aren’t ever going to have an audience you care about that way. Not that I mean to pick a fight with the Catholic Church,” I lied, “but sainthood isn’t about the saint. The best saint in the world is only as good as his flock.”

  “Honey, were we really in Italy together?”

  “Oh, fuck you. Fuck you in Napoli while the chambermaid watches us,” I said and gathered I’d better move on. “I was writing for fat-assed civilians in Darien and places. Of course I want those idiots to think I’m wonderful! You were drawing for the guys and you miss thinking they’re wonderful. How can you now that they’re all back to buying Studebakers, cheating on their taxes and voting Republican?”

  I’d love to tell you Bill shouted “Eureka!” and strode forth from Chasen’s a new man. I still think I was right, but that’s not how life works. “Maybe so,” was all he said. Then, “Did I ever tell you what I was going to do with my two jokers?”

  “No.”

  “I was going to kill them. I ain’t sure when I knew, but one day I knew that had to be the last cartoon. They were going to be the last two guys to get it in the ETO the day the war ended. It had to be them.”

  “Why, pray?”

  “So it wouldn’t be anybody else! It was every GI’s nightmare. It was mine.”

  “What happened?”
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  “Oh, Stars and Stripes nixed it.”

  Fresh out of other ideas that excluded disrobing, our waitress finally brought our next round. Still wearing a shriven look—maybe Cary Grant had starred in I Was a Male War Bride, but Carole Lombard’s plane crash had retired the lead in I Was a Male War Widow—Clark Gable came through the door, his broad shoulders maneuvering from the ever problematic street into a realm where he wasn’t unusual. I raised my glass: “To Oz.”

  Ruefully, Bill smiled. “To Oz.”

  Posted by: Pamzio

  Or to one damn Oz after another, as Tim Cadwaller—another latecomer who thinks it's all about Bert Lahr and 1939 Technicolor, not Bill's and my cherished L. Frank Baum—puts it in You Must Remember This: The Posthumous Career of World War Two. Each turned into Kansas as we left it, and still you fucking children wonder why my generation boozed. We didn’t have that many constants.

  I still rue how Bill didn’t stay one of Pam’s. That’s not only because his two jokers are swapping tales on Parnassus with Paul Bunyan and these mimsy borogoves you know as your Gramela’s glaucomedic eyes watched an imp in a knit cap scrounge for paper to draw them on. However little Bill's cartoons resemble that odd duck Sean Finn’s perverse comic books about the superpower diaspora, Nan’s strange son reveres him and would plainly have given anything, anything!, for intimate converse with my Anzio Bobbsey twin face to face. I might have had a decent chat myself with Sean for a change when we compared adult heights at the glorious girl’s Christmas party a dozen Yules or so back if he hadn't looked crestfallen—and accusing, which was a bit self-promotional if you ask me—at hearing that his hero and I were no longer in touch.

  Bill’s later adventures on Clio were stranger than mine, and that’s why I like to picture us bumping into each other on layovers now and again. We’d have caught up as propeller and then jet engines reorchestrated our century’s tornado: me watching a succession of hemlines go up, then down, then up, then down on the Buchanan gams, Bill testing how much history could crowd that cherub face without turning its grins Luddite or worse. The reverie gets iced each time Pink Thing’s archives reconfirm that Chasen’s was and now always will be the last time we met.