by Carson, Tom
Posted by: Pam
Hand it to our road-not-taken minds for their ability to miscast us worse than Hollywood at its most Zanuckleheaded. Not only was my mother no caregiver and hence incapable of raising one, but Pam’s only real-world try at “There, there”—comforting a miscarrying actress who’d slept with my husband in a delirious dressing room—had been a mangle of hamfisted Murphine commands and Pamcentric confusions. When I first tried out being my own tailor’s dummy in “The View from Ward Three,” I’d played not soother but casualty: a mock patient mock–ministered to in New Mexico by the trainees I’d named for my old schoolmates.
I’d even felt uncomfortable writing “The Angel of Anzio.” That was partly because I’d never made a heroine out of someone dead before and partly because I hadn’t really known the jolly warm girl I called Dolly Rydell in print. (Even on a beachhead, you can move in different social sets.) When I waded onto Omaha three months later, terrified our wounded would call to me when my only hypo was a pencil, I’d ditched the Red Cross–mooned helmet that made me look like a corpsman faster than you could say Florence Nightingale. Yet I ended up feminizing the same disguise in by Pamela Buchanan’s final report from the ETO, possibly earning Bill M.’s disgust if he read “The Gates” and spotted the imposture. If he did—and he had an inscribed first printing of Nothing, after all—he never mentioned it. My only excuse was that a real nurse would’ve been as helpless.
Of course, one advantage of writing for a fat-assed civilian readership in Darien and places is that nobody from Roy on down asked what one would be doing up with front-line combat troops. That’s why Gerson, who’d never been in the military, surprised me by taking my dissimulation for granted. “When I first read that—in Regent’s, not to brag—I was touched that you wanted to imagine yourself as a healer,” said the perplexingly (my head was still stuffed with the unbroken crockery of New York cliches) thoughtful man who wanted to put Nothing on the screen.
It was the day after my arrival in Los Angeles, and he was showing me around Metro. Delectably spread for the sky’s giant blue appetite, this part of the lot was all whitewashed buildings, soothing lawns. A Swiss Alp got heaved up and relowered beyond them by unseen but cursing workmen. Brisk staffers on errands hurried past somebody dressed as Napoleon.
“I didn’t have much choice,” I stammered. “I mean I couldn’t have been me! I wouldn’t have known how. But I couldn’t bring myself to be no one—omniscient—not there. A God’s-eye view made no sense. And then just by process of elimination, you know, why else would a woman be in Dachau?”
Not at all rudely, Gerson gave a very dry chuckle. “You’re right. There are limits. But ach!” (That was deliberate.) “We’ll settle.”
“Yes, there are limits! Do you have any idea how—my God, how presumptuous that would’ve been?” If that left him thinking I’d considered dressing myself in a not-quite-former woman’s filthy togs at the typewriter before I virtuously rejected imagination’s promotion and wasn’t just trying to worm out of a gaffe, so be it.
“As a matter of fact, I do. That’s why it’d be a relief to quit trying. Hopeless, but I feel obliged. Shall we go off the lot for lunch?”
“I’m not sure I’d know the difference, so it’s completely up to you.”
Nodding, he took Pam’s elbow with rare calm for someone shorter than me. How many actresses he must’ve steered to water. The real Gerson touch was that he didn’t tell me which we were doing, paradoxical reassurance I was in good hands.
“I’ll tell you something that’ll help,” he offered, correctly interpreting my stare at all the roofless cars. “Hoping, Miss Buchanan, that you do stay on a while. No, L.A. isn’t a real city—that part’s true. It is a real place, though. The problem for most East Coasters is that they can’t see the forest for the palm trees.”
“Problem for or problem with?”
My future second husband laughed. “Oh! That’s when we get into personalities. But if you’re shrewd enough to ask, my guess is that you’ll love it here. I do.”
“It’s Pam,” I said a bit late. “By the bye.”
Posted by: Pam-Luc Godard
We’d been married several years by the time Gerson, in a rage—not at me—confessed he’d masturbated to Dame’s jacket drawing shortly before he placed a movie-rights call to Cath Charters. I’m not trying to shock you or make you think ill of him; the point was his zest for thinking ill of himself, a subject immune to my input. We always agreed on so much except the standards the ideal Gerson should be held to.
If he’d been puckish about it instead of self-lacerating, he wouldn’t have been the Gerson I wed in ’49 at L.A.’s City Hall; the Gerson who never knew that made two of us, although my understanding was he’d had the actual book propped in his briefly locked office and I’d just gotten the drawing’s lines entwined in a Tijuana-biblical, Myrna-loyal reverie the night before I flew to California. Lax shiksa that I was, I hadn’t felt too incriminated. But Gerson’s penis just blamed him for everything, and its owner put too much stock in individuality’s sacredness to care that most men did it the other way around.
How many marriages founder in confusion over which one’s job it is to heal the other? If you think ours foundered over a silly mental picture of Gerson killing the snake to my book’s cover art, oh please. We were happy before and after that confession. If in temporarily separate ways, we were even happy during, since we both knew his determination to insist some remote core of him was unhealable wouldn’t outlast Pam’s astonishment that he could mistake such flimsy stuff for his core.
Besides, every marriage has its defining time of day, and ours was breakfast, not midnight: Gerson plucking at his orange juice and making jokes at Variety as if it were a child that needed a giggle. Me going through decorators’ brochures and sorting invites to the Wilders’, the Kellys’, and the Governor’s Ball until Glory Be’s stirrings dungeoned me most nights in my study.
My second book included, all this was unimaginable to me as I began learning my part in what became the incredibly dithering, protracted—and given the results, wasted—chore of turning my first one into a movie. Cath had wangled me a screenplay deal, citing my gift in Dame for quick he-she byplay; I later learned she even reminded the studio I’d been married to Bran, a sort of credential by osmosis. Nonetheless, I had to be partnered and immediately was. After our lunch (off the lot, French, delightful), Gerson led me to the writers’ building to meet a sofa with the power of speech named Wylie White.
Reputedly handsomer before booze began playing Rodin, he’d been married for a while to none other than Celia Brady, whose memoir The Producer’s Daughter I’d tormented Alisteir Malcolm by reviewing so rhapsodically for the old Republic in another life. But I never got to meet Wylie’s ex, not even to thank or spank her for her answering praise of Nothing Like a Dame. As I learned from my first eager inquiries while scanning the room at Hollywood parties, she’d moved to Arizona on doctors’ orders shortly before I reached the West Coast. So my flickering hunch we’d get along like long-lost sisters never got tested outside print: two slim books whose dust jackets (hers annoyingly pictureless) I had a tendency to catch for years peering up side by side each time I unpacked my library.
If not Celia, then I’d hoped to be teamed with Bettina Hecuba, whose credits went back to Griffith and who’d won one of literary Manhattan’s rare dispensations from charges of whoring in the California sun. Smart as a tick, she kept in New York’s good graces by impersonating an unrepentant golddigger; I knew I had it made when Dame’s first reviewer compared it to Bettina’s expertly addlepated Now and Then, There’s a Girl Such as I. Horrified by the thought of two women, neither one shackled to Hollywood (Bettina at least kept five pert toes wiggling East), witching it up on their payroll, Metro’s preference was for a male’s wise hand. Or wise back, my usual view of Wylie as he slept off the th
ree double martinis that had washed down an elephant’s idea of too few peanuts at lunch.
We got along like gangbusters when he was sleeping, not too badly when he pawed himself awake. Overseeing three other movies’ progress at the time, Gerson had given us marching orders whose fundamental irrelation to reality I was too new to Hollywood to appreciate. Once I did, I understood how men of his caliber might put up with peddling treacly illusions to the public for the sake of the interludes when they got to enjoy the more gallant illusions they’d cooked up for themselves.
Gerson was no hack, far from it. He was a man deeply fired by earnest beliefs, including that movies could and should be better. He’d admired my war reporting, and far from bemoaning “The Gates of Hell”’s inclusion in Dame’s first printing, he told me I should’ve done that all the way through—interlarding each chapter of comedy with “The Angel of Anzio,” “Bacchanapoli,” “The Day the Tide Ran Red,” “Tiger! Tiger!,” and my other ETO pieces for Regent’s.
“They’re both true!” he told Wylie and me firmly. “And if we can make an audience see they’re both true, they’re both always true—the slapstick, the horror, yes? Yes?—then I think we end up showing them that this was a very American kind of war. Unless, Pam, you’re really from Winnipeg.”
“The truth is she’s really from Winnipam,” said Wylie. “Peg is her name. I love how he says ‘American,’” he went on once Gerson had left. “It’s like hearing a virgin say ‘Cunt.’ Say it often enough and open sesame, the Great Bush will appear.”
“Oh, I like it,” I said.
“Cunt? So do I. No wonder you wish I was Bettina. That’s the reason I drink, you know. I’d never touched a drop until you—”
“No, you jackass. The way it matters to him.”
“It does,” said Wylie shortly. “But I’ve been around longer than he has, Peg, and one thing I know about Hollywood is that it takes a very smart man to be a real idiot. I’m only a mildly smart man. I’m perfect.”
“You must’ve cared about something once. Just for me, can’t you pretend? I promise I won’t be in Los Angeles long.”
“I am American. I don’t need to.”
I decided to ignore his implication Passaic wasn’t in the U.S.A., and we settled down to reconciling the Pam Buchanan of Regent’s with Nothing’s Dame, little knowing—all right, Wylie probably did—she’d turn into The Gal. By my next birthday, in spite of my collaborator’s damn near sestinal siestas and morning yawns of “Tell me again about the lighter side of Dachau,” we had a script I liked. Then a schoolboy, Jean-Luc Godard might’ve liked it too—especially the Godard of Les Carabiniers, one of Tim Cadwaller’s favorites. Even with a Balkan blank like Metro’s Tod Paspartu directing instead, it could’ve made a reasonably good movie, that is if it’d had a snowball’s chance in Trader Vic’s of ever being made.
Since I didn’t have a clue, I was beginning to enjoy myself. On Metro’s tab, I had a suite—though not bungalow—at That Hotel. Could look down from my window on its pool’s frescoes of paunchy gents toasting at rest, their sunglasses as declarative as a firing squad’s blindfold, among magnificent girls in Newton-defying bathing suits as waiters circulated and bellhops trotted out with plug-inable phones. While you won’t believe it, Panama, in those days a telephone’s status was indicated by its heft and Bakelite sheen, not its resemblance to a metal hangnail.
Appearing poolside myself, the Hollywood equivalent of a debut at the court of St. James, struck me as both unnerving and a bigger commitment than Pam’s signature on my Metro contract. I’d learned at Anzio, no less, that too much sun turned me freckled and peeling instead of gorgeously tanned, and the Buchanan gams were my only feature that gave me any hope of passing for suitable human scenery. Still, it was either that or binoculars, and after a week, having bought a demure but not wholly unchic tartan two-piece and my own shiny firing-squad blindfold, I wrapped myself in a hotel robe and went down.
No doubt it’s just Pink Thing’s archives having fun that I recall those with The Naked and the Dead on their laps looking up to trade competitive glares with those starting Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions. Having just about finished John Horne Burns’s The Gallery, I was rather bleakly thinking Napoli had kept a few secrets from the Bobbsey twins when a bellhop startled me by plugging in a phone next to my chaise. It was Gerson asking me to be his dinner date at the Gene Kellys: “I was supposed to be holding Lily Hellman’s hand. Not really her cup of hemlock, but Betsy Blair [then Mrs. Kelly] is doing Another Part of the Forest over at Universal and if you’re Lillian you tend the greensward. But she’s flying back East to nurse Hammett. Thank God,” he added decisively, careful to erase any insult I might feel at being asked so late.
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.