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

by Carson, Tom

  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.

  The pool itself was still brightly lit, presumably on the off chance Carole Lombard’s plane’s pilot might spot it in time. Yet from the chaises and tables to the famously pink but now murky imitations of the Palais Royal’s walls that framed it, its surroundings were dark. Mine, all mine!

  After wrapping the Buchanan bod, still in the pointless altogether, in a That Hotel robe, I grabbed my cigarettes. Having made sure Gerson’s breathing was even, I slipped out. So bored he’d clearly hoped his ornate uniform would do the job without his waking help, an age-speckled doorman stirred downstairs: “Pool’s closed, Miss.”

 
“I’m naked under this,” I said impulsively. “Want to see?”

  Blearily looking me up and down, he considered the idea. Then he said “No” so wryly we both laughed. “What the hell. Just tell them you found the door unlocked, okay?”

  “Sure thing. But won’t that get you in trouble—Admiral, sir?”

  He smiled. “I’m not the guy who locks it.”

  Once he’d ushered me through, I found a prime chaise. Someone’s abandoned copy of The Naked and the Dead—or was it The Young Lions?—lay broken-backed below my feet. Every hunter of tranquility knows that in a state like mine you’re better off waiting for thoughts to come instead of chasing after them. Especially if the lure of water’s nearby, you need only put out the bait: yourself.

  Feathery and Lombard-light, they settled as I tried not to disturb them. Between Glendale and Beverly Hills, each time the studio car I’d shanghaied had proved privilege’s uselessness by stopping at a red light, Pam had grown irritably aware that her fine fettle of outrage at everything under the moon except me wasn’t the whole story. Now, drawn by the pool and the noncomma of noncleavage in the terrycloth V of my plush robe, the rest could peep into view.

  My indignation at The Gal I Left Behind Me’s travesty of Bill had hidden abject, cowardly relief that now no one would ever guess my most bathetic wartime secret. What’s unnerving about Hollywood distortions is that they can hit on camouflaged kung pao as easily as not. At that June story conference, only a monkey’s-paw coin toss whose upshot I’d awaited in panic—“We argued, but I like this Eddie”—had stopped The Gal from spilling the beans.

  Oh, crap; oh, Christ. Of course, you fucking fools. Of course I’d been in love with Bill! I was crazy in love with my Anzio Bobbsey twin, as in love as I’ve ever been with any man up to Cadwaller. I’d let Eddie Whitling pound Pam’s socket from London to Bavaria to see if I could learn to ignore it.

  It stayed not only chaste but unmentioned. If I once or twice told myself I’d seen a certain something in Bill’s cheerful eyes, it was probably delusional—or just a friendly, accepting, possibly agreeing but unverbalized reaction to seeing the same something in mine. I do realize daisysdaughter.com hasn’t been long on evidence I’m dainty, but did that snapshot of his wife and baby do me in. Besides, so much had already been spoiled and wrecked and shot up around us that I knew I could never do anything to spoil our beachhead twinhood. If Bill did do any fooling around in the ETO—and remember, he was young, adorable, far from home, and even by 1944, famous: famous at twenty-three, sweet Jesus—he kept it out of his memoirs. Aside from helping me out of the odd dugout, he never touched me once.

  In a token, I suppose, of my helpless respect, he doesn’t in my favorite recurring daydream of us either. As I recline on a looted, luxuriant couch at Nettuno, wearing only dog tags, I’m letting—letting!—him sketch me in the nude. One arm hooked behind my head, I’m smiling as his eyes flick back and forth from his pad to the newly lush Buchanan bod.

  Unlike Nothing Like a Dame’s cover art and my old friend Rose Butaker Dawson’s broken bowl, that drawing exists only in my mind. If it ever existed in his, by now it might as well be at the bottom of the Atlantic. Or the Tyrrhenian Sea.

  Posted by: Pam

  Never shared even with Gerson, since by our rules I’d have only had to if he was going to be introduced to Bill in my company, that little secret was to add another irony to a cranium bulging with them when these astonished, then amused mimsies scanned Tim Cadwaller’s defense of The Gal I Left Behind Me. “Of course it’s untrue to 1944–45,” he blusters. “So what? It’s preciously true to 1948–49, which we remember less. The only generalization I’ve ever allowed myself about movies is that they’re always really about how life looked to people at the time they were made.”

  Pompous, no? “Allowed myself” is beneath you, Tim. No reader does or should give a fig about our inner tussles. So you wished you could sleep with luscious Eve Harrington? That makes you stand out from the crowd.

  I’m not saying it’s charmless. Nobody else cares and I can’t help being tickled when people like Tim vouch for the kung pao of eras that predate their birth. As you know, Panama, I’m fond of your dad. On my generation’s rotting behalf, I’m flattered our whole moldy shebang means so much to him.

  How it must drive him berserk that he’ll never know Hollywood’s voluptuous allure in 1948–49. Much less what the ETO was like in 1944–45.

  What was it like? I’m not sure I can say after sixty-plus years. Pam’s gone from gal to pretzel. Traducing Dame’s cover sketch, my medicine-cabinet mug shot burlesques the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. And I just don’t think about the war that often.

  Sorry, Tim. I know it was your dream of dreams when you set up this website: your Gramela’s reminiscences of 1944–45. Normandy, Anzio, the liberation of Paris! All of which I lived through, saw, smelled, ducking at times and waving at others. But I’m going to be a mess of pink and gray things come sundown and I don’t want to waste my last hours. Let Dachau stand for the rest.

  Trucks droned by and sweaty men jerkily plodded. What do you want, Mr. Cadwaller? I was awfully young and lived superficially, and to tell it all properly would need a book as fat as—though I hope far more readable than—Edmond Whitling’s forgotten The Rough Draft of History. It was only a war long ago and I can’t believe the world is still interested. Much better just to fast-forward to me in 1949, still lying poolside in a darkened hotel.

  There, as I recall, I did make an attempt to cull and preserve some bits of kung pao now that I’d seen what Hollywood could do. Since I was near bright floating bought water [fix later, Ard], I thought of how I’d watched more than one LST (Landing Ship, Tank) come off the stays in Memphis and New Orleans shipyards. Seeing one at the surfline—reversibly, thanks to those huge things’ shallow draft—as enough wheeled and tracked vehicles rumbled out to make you think it hadn’t been their transport but their factory, wheels and tracks thrashing Mediterranean water and then gouging Italian sand, had made me gape even though I’d just disembarked myself and briefly looked back.

  Boxes and cases and bidons and crates of supplies were stacked up everywhere, not looking as high as they actually were. They were half interred, camouflaged, tented. We got shelled every day and nothing we held was out of German artillery range. Too tizzied by my own survival to understand the meaning of the corpsmen pushing past us to where Anzio Annie had sent up gouts of sand and some darker soft rocks and green and red sticks, Pam’s giggly talking jag after her baptism of fire (I was here! It was there! Here I am! How amazing) ran its hysterical course without Bill interrupting. Then he brought me ever so gently back down to earth: “Come on, Pam. Those guys in the Hermann Goering Division may be fanatical Nazis, but they’re only human. You know they’d never hurt you.”

  That was all of a week before one German pilot in a hurry dumped his bombload wherever and I heard someone call “Nurses too.” Then someone else in the villa called out “How many?” as we dumped our coffee and grabbed for our helmets and pencils and someone called “Three.” Someone stopped and said, “Jesus. Not Ellie Farnsdale,” because she was the one we all worried about. But someone called, “No, she’s all right. She took charge.”

  Even though his old division held a sector farther west, Bill’s favorite outfit when scouting material was the First Special Service Force, a joint Canadian-American commando brigade. They did things Bill knew he’d be accused of fancifulness for using in his cartoons, like electing one of their favorite lieutenants mayor of a pocked sun-blasted village out in no man’s land they’d moved into for the fun of it and renamed Gusville.

  Most units didn’t have favorite lieutenants, but the Force wasn’t most units. I got treated to dinner out in Gusville once; my waiter was a German prisoner picked up on patrol. So I was led to believe until he took off his coalscuttle helmet, quit glaring, and la
ughed, “Ma’am, I’m from Toronto. We just felt a mite bored and like goofing around. No disrespect.” The next time we went back we were told he’d been killed.

  That was Anzio. But not Anzio, a Cro-Magnon opus starring Robert Mitchum as a war correspondent more likely to try eating a typewriter than use one, which I walked out on twenty minutes in. It had no kung pao at all. That was five less than I lasted at The Devil’s Brigade, leaving a blessedly empty Washington theater to go surprise Cadwaller at the Department once I got fed up with red-faced William Holden insisting he was Robert T. Frederick, the First SSF’s CO.

  Not much against Holden, Panama. But by ’68 he’d seen better days and in ’44 Bob Frederick hadn’t. He was my definition of a leader of men and out of combat you’d have taken him for the only prof at a small Midwestern college who could order kung pao beef without fear and saw that as the limit of courage, though never civility.

  If Bill ever noticed I always decided to hitch a ride with the Navy back down to Naples when he did and back up to the beachhead when he did, he was too kind or just worried—not shy? As Jake Cohnstein said, hope springs eternal—to mention it. If you had dispensation, it was easier than hailing a cab in Manhattan. Our side’s water taxis plied back and forth constantly, ferrying wounded men one way and materiel the other.

  Far enough out to sea to be sure any shore guns in the mood for a potshot would only liquidate water, we’d watch the coast’s toothy towns and lumpy spearmint-sprigged squeezes of batter slide by. Casualties in flapping or newly sliced uniforms shared the rail on the down trip and equipment was lashed at our backs on the up. As if the sight reminded us that Italy would’ve been overseas even had it been peacetime, it was most often then we’d find ourselves chatting about our lives in the States.