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

by Carson, Tom

  “Someone” was the Hollywood note, since the faint implication he’d know them was leverage grasping at straws. I’d put him through a lot if he was thinking like a producer, but that’s not the only reason I gaped. Living people weren’t especially real to me in those days. Airplanes, trains, hotels, taxis, whole cities—Boston, ugh—were simply obstructions I had to put up with for the sake of one building, one church spire at daybreak, one hill young Washington had cantered along, one fringe of trees, or one library. The full Pam materializing only when I’d made contact, I slid through the rest like a ghost.

  “No, Gerson, no! My God,” I said. “If I were having an affair with anyone, I’d be having it with you.”

  Didn’t quite hit the right note, did it? He didn’t think so either. “Say the word, Pammie. Name the day.”

  I didn’t mean to be glib. I meant to be poetic: “April 19, 1775.”

  He looked down at his plate. “I’ll be in Europe,” he said.

  Posted by: Haroun Pam-Raschid

  Oh, buck. I’d bucking well bucked us up good and proper, hadn’t I? But I was in the literary opium den, greedily puffing on a pipe shaped like a Colonial fife. Turbaned and scimitared, I was mentally sauntering among the perfumed lemons and melons of history’s seraglio, murmuring “That one” to Qwertyuiop: my Smith-Coronal, many-eyed vizier. The eunuch had no say! By that stage in Glory Be’s composition, I could no more have braked or redirected myself had I been a bullet.

  The truth is, Gerson’s obtuseness mostly just maddened me. Couldn’t he grasp the rose in the nettle? Not only was my book my gift to him; it was his to me. If not for my husband’s quaint and then frighteningly unreliable passion for Winken, Blinken, and Nod, I’d have never understood, never cared, never experienced this world’s true fourth dimension: yesterday. Never have discovered a past I now saw had precipitated me.

  Knowing both sets of my forebears had been on the scene, I searched as if drunk for Buchanans and Fays. Dead Daisy’s daughter wanted one chapter to serve as a not too conspicuous marker indicating her stake in the emerging pattern. Never found a good one, but in my own mind I settled on a metaphoric substitute. Too little known planter heiress Martha Shelton (b. 1707, d. 1745) became the heroine of Chap. 15, “A Romance.”

  In an episode I saw as crystallizing the new fluidity of social relations in the still apple-carted, British-aping, yet inchoately freedom-seeking colonies, she’d alarmed the proud Virginia Sheltons by falling in love with one Alfred Wiggins (b. ?, d. 1767), the family tutor: mathematics for her brothers, pianoforte for her. Alarm turned to outrage when she married Wiggins once his seven years’ indentured servitude were up. All was posthumously forgiven when Shelton Wiggins (b. 1745, d. 1806) became a captain of the Continental volunteers, cited for unusual valor at the Battle of Brandywine—you had to turn to Glory Be’s appendix, “The Aftermaths,” to learn this—and a friend to both Patrick Henry and Jefferson. No mean trick, incidentally.

  “Saltsbury” still stood outside Culpeper, where Cadwaller and I were to buy a pied-à-terre we liked many Indian-summery years later. Already visited once, it was Martha Shelton’s home I was off to, with a stopover at Nenuphar to see Brother Nicholas, when I confronted Gerson’s true anguish. I doubt my husband had ever seriously worried I was parking the Buchanan bod gams ahoy to welcome the penetrating historical insights of Philadelphians and Richmonders. That was just the comic-book sexualization of his deepest dread.

  He always drove me to the airport when he could, with a goodbye kiss as pleasantly dry as those we’d exchanged before we ever slept together. But this was a night flight, and I suspect that’s why he couldn’t take it. He was gripping the steering wheel like a fatal X-ray.

  “Gerson, are you ill? I thought the chicken salad was a little off myself. But you know how Ava gets when she thinks you’ve repoached—sorry, reproached—her.”

  Knowing it would have trouble speaking, his mouth meticulously squared itself. “I swear,” he said, “I swear I never think about it when it’s me who’s flying. And if we’re flying together, Pammie? Then I can always tell myself, ‘Well, at least…’”

  He didn’t need to finish that one. “Yes,” I said. “Me too.”

  “Do you, can you, have any idea how I hate to leave—how I hate dropping people off, at airports? I’ve never told you, but I wait every time. I sit in this car and I watch the takeoff. Day or night, I follow the plane with my eyes until it’s not there anymore. Then I just hope it’s still somewhere.”

  “Gerson, Carole Lombard’s plane—”

  “Please don’t call it that. No, never mind; that’s not the issue. I know everyone always will. But now you do it all the time, all the time!” he cried, meaning flying rather than misnaming Stella Negroponte’s plane. “All the time.”

  “Well, I’ve got no choice now! You know that.”

  He let that one pass. “I don’t want to have to ask Wylie White for another favor, Pammie. I don’t want it to happen again! I couldn’t stand it. And even when you’re home, but up there, you know—working—I start imagining it’s already happened.”

  “Oh, love! Gerson, I promise. I vow. History isn’t going to repeat itself.”

  “How can you say? How can you know? It’s random.”

  “I’m not. And I’ll never be.”

  He looked at Pam for confirmation. What did he see? The yes in my eyes, the no of my nose. The mixed-up thou of my mouth. Through my clothes, which he always could read like a book, the dotted I-I of Pam’s nipples. The nave of my navel, the us of my—ah, screw it. I knew I’d get in trouble sooner or later. I still rate that moment the most intimate Gerson and I ever shared.

  Notice what I didn’t say: And I’m not pregnant. We’d never spoken of his garbled admission to Jake that Stella had been, which he didn’t realize I’d heard and I gathered nobody knew. Wylie White would have told me if Gerson and the first Mrs. Gerson had shared the happy news before she boarded. Nonetheless, in my own writerly mind, saying I wasn’t pregnant wouldn’t have been true—and in Gerson’s mind, since he loved me, it wouldn’t have been true either.

  I kissed his cheek. “I’ve got to go.”

  Go I did. Come back in one piece every time—no real suspense there, is there?—I did too. Except in the Clio Airways sense, where crash victims I was fond of litter daisysdaughter.com’s landscape, I hadn’t then and miraculously still haven’t ever known anyone who died in a plane wreck. Even David Cohnstein, a B-17 waist gunner who planned on surviving the war to go to what he called Palestine, was only a name and the same curly-haired snapshot in Sharon’s purse and Jake’s wallet.

  Despite dully guessing that Wylie had had to suck in his breath and then nod before they opened his future nightmares’ Pandora’s box, I’d always been most conscious of the fact of Stella Negroponte’s death, not its manner. It had never sunk in how haunted Gerson must be by its manner. He’d never tried to turn me into Stella. Not without reason, he probably thought he’d married her opposite. Yet I’d terrified him by threatening to undo that all by myself.

  Perhaps because that parting had been so intimate, the reunion was shy. As if our Boulevard Rule from Metro days now fit Pam, not him, and its geography had been reversed, we were past Sunset before he asked, “Go well?”

  “Yes! Oh, Gerson, I’m so close now. I’ve already done Lexington. The only big job I’ve got is to get Martha to pop out Shelton Wiggins and then bury that bitch for good, tie up a few loose ends, and—I’ll be done.”

  Even to myself, I’d never said it before. Selflessly, Gerson wreathed me in smiles. By the next light, he’d grown a wee bit less selfless: I heard a tick of Gersonish mirth from the driver’s seat. Nudged him.

  “What, little man?”

  “I thought I was the only one who called her ‘that bitch,’” he said with amusement. “Never to her face
, of course.”

  “I swear I’ll make it up to you. Really, not that much longer!” I tried to remember how non-authors computed. “Two months at the outside. Can you wait? Oh, please wait.”

  Wait, Gerson did. Wreath me in even more laureled smiles when Glory Be came out and became a bestseller, he did. The West Coast pub party was at Romanoff’s, and I don’t believe he was harboring any Bolshevik schemes. Knowing him as he did, I’m sure the decision that ended our marriage wasn’t taken until an hour at most before he told me, and that was only because he’d woken up earlier. That was on the vacation that, flush with new royalties and Random’s promise of more, I insisted on treating him to make up for it all.

  Just the same, I watched Glory Be miss out on the Pulitzer alone. Had my twenty minutes of banter with Jack Kennedy, the winner, alone. Well, no, not alone: it was a banquet at the Waldorf in spring ’57. In those days, they didn’t officially announce the also-rans, so in theory Pam Buchanan was just a fellow guest and author rather than a thwarted rival. If you were in the know, though, you knew; I knew. He knew, and he was there alone too. Off at some horse show, Jackie was a no-show.

  What a different book this might be—Ard, I’ll fix later—if I’d had a bit more bosom, was three inches shorter, and Antoine hadn’t messed up the perm. But I digress.

  The name “Gerson” appears nowhere in Glory Be. While in his family’s case the connection would’ve been literally nominal, since it was an Ellis Island alias, I’d hunted for suitable Gersons as well as Fays and Buchanans, thinking the gesture might please or tickle him. Had no luck on that score in Philadelphia or Culpeper, the Great Meadows a.k.a. Fort Necessity, Nantucket, or Boston. Yet my second husband isn’t missing from my second book, even though it probably went right by in Minnesota.

  While I worked on the thing, he’d had only two distant competitors. One was Jake Cohnstein, which would certainly have added more apoplexy to Alisteir Malcolm’s How the Red Faded Out of Old Glory. The other was Stella Negroponte, but that would have just upset Gerson—whom Pam, in that annoying habit I picked up from dames in hard-boiled movies and fell into with all three of my husbands, had never called anything but Gerson in conversation or letters. Not this time, though, and the last two words I wrote were the first two I’d imagined on a hungover morning two years gone. On a page headed “Front Matter” and destined for Random House, I typed, “For Noah.”

  3. Gerson’s Hope

  Posted by: Pam

  Unless you’re on the lucky side of forty, you’ll know which two passing remarks in my last batch of Pam-pages are sure to bring a hail of cyber-opprobrium down on l’équipe here at plucky little daisysdaughter.com. But That’s My Fran fans can lump it.

  Once Rheuma One, new nickname for my gnarled forefinger, clicks “Post,” we don’t look back. No matter how much abuse you hurl, I’m not going to delete “grimace queen” or recant my 1954 line of dialogue, in casual—all right, not very—conversation with Jake Cohnstein, tagging Fran Kukla as “the horror.” Observe me instead as I lift my ancient hand from the mouse and revolve it to jab Rheuma Two upward in solitary grandeur.

  If I’ve got any misgivings, Panama, they’re about your Gramela’s venture into cyberporn. That I do wish I’d left out; it’s the sort of thing Sean Finn would dream up. Let’s just hope Tim restrains him from too much of that in their collaboration.

  For Tim’s marriage’s sake, he’d better stay more alert to his surroundings while he’s at it than I was during Glory Be’s composition. If making the beast with two hard covers hadn’t been Haroun Pam-Raschid’s command to Qwertyuiop for most of ’54, all of 1955, and some of 1956, my wily Smith-Coronal vizier and I might have been less stunned by Gerson’s announcement of his plans in December of ’56. I’d have been as heartbroken in the immediate scheme of things and as happy for his sake once I’d knocked some perspective into myself, just less stunned.

  Thanks to our ten p.m. dinners and now hurried breakfasts, I knew in cutlery-clinking detail what Fran and Gene Rickey were putting him through. Itching as I was to get back to my upstairs seraglio, I still thought I could indefinitely postpone compassion more active than conversational bandages. Measuring my authorial megalomania for a marital straitjacket more than I knew, I also thought Glory Be would be enough to balm all Gerson’s wounds: not only those I’d carelessly inflicted with my jolly multiple reprises of Stella’s final flight and distracted impersonations of her footsteps pacing the ceiling, but the ones that bathed his brain in blood daily in Burbank.

  Fat chance. I could’ve been Winken, Blinken, and Nod rolled together; I could’ve been Barbara Tuchman herself. My book’s case for the defense still couldn’t have matched Fran’s, Gene’s, and Rik-Kuk’s case for the persecution.

  Posted by: Pam

  That’s My Fran was the nest egg, and I’d hate to have been the vet who examined the golden goose after that one came out. Costarring Hippolyte Lecteur—Americanized as “Hy Lector” in the credits, he was an ex-bandleader who’d had a minor hit dueting with Piaf on a novelty song, as if French popular music is ever anything but, called “Coûte Que Coûte, Cocotte”—the series’s back story was that Fran had met her French husband as a wacky WAC in Marseille. Now he played the accordion and sang in the swank San Francisco nightclub where she kept trying, etc., etc.

  Squawking, That’s My Fran ruled the roost at One Eye, as the era’s foremost broadcast network was known in the industry and as a pretty dubious-sounding after-hours joint in the meat-packing district was known to a few of Jake’s acquaintances in Manhattan. Yet the proof the Age of Conformity wasn’t misnamed was that Fran Kukla ruled at both.

  Not all men in gray flannel suits were immune to an urge to slip into something more comfortable. After the only time Jake, never too happy camping, got hauled off to visit the cabaret One Eye, we got a dazed report in his next letter. Our Fran was the orange-wigged specialty of all three female impersonators he’d seen before finishing his lukewarm paper cup of Eureka Gin, giving a whole new echt-Fifties meaning to mon semblable, mon frère.

  Giving it another, the legitimate One Eye was home to the now visually squared radio voice of Eddie Whitling, its evening newscast’s most ponderous marble jaw. Knowing he’d be forced to defer with penguin-suited chuckles to my ETO ex didn’t do wonders for Gerson’s mood when, corporately summoned to New York, he had to put on a tux and dithyrambulate around the room at network powwows. As he used to say, their only purpose he could see was to settle who had the best dentist.

  Though I probably did a worse job than I thought of hiding my frustration at being yanked from Glory Be’s better world, I used to go with him when I was on the East Coast. My presence made face time with One Eye’s star embalmer of current events at once easier and harder on Gerson. Our glass-clinking small talk would have sounded as civilized as quoits if you’d heard it on tape. Only Eddie’s grin kept my husband advised that, by the obnoxious rules of his sexual poker game, prior bedding topped a wedding. His crayoning eyebrows intimated that in the sack his Pamita was someone Gerson wouldn’t have recognized, infuriating me more because he had a point.

  Naturally, I voiced neither fury nor cause in our taxicab autopsies (if four-wheeled L.A. after dark is a Ferris wheel, four-wheeled New York after dark is a penguin morgue). Nor did I ever feel the faintest commemorative flutter in Eddie’s presence. Among other things, his always boiled eyes were now slightly thyroidic, as if inside his muscularly groomed face a circus clown was struggling to get out.

  Luckily, if only in the limited sense of the word implied by the French military attaché who once reminded me with some annoyance that it doesn’t snow on Devil’s Island, Gerson was spared the day-to-day running of That’s My Fran. His name danced on unseen strings in its credits only as it did in those of all Rik-Kuk shows: “Noah Gerson, Executive in Charge of Production.” Gene Rickey oversaw the nest egg while
Fran clucked and mimed flying, repaid every week in her ego’s ransom of fuzzy canned laughter.

  Brought aboard, he was told, to give Rik-Kuk pedigree, Gerson asked for and got a free hand. The other was usually wrenched up between his shoulderblades by Gene Rickey’s armlock before noon, a figurative ordeal so painful that inside a year my husband, no sybarite, had hired a literal masseuse. Busy upstairs with Pocahontas, I never felt jealous of Ursula. Both Luz and Ava damn near put on mourning, though.

  Even when his pet projects limped onto the air, they’d come down by then with Rickeyfied worms. One that caused Gerson special grief was Shocks of Recognition, which up to its first pilot had featured a panel of eminent modern-day historians interviewing actors made up as Adams vs. Jefferson, Burr vs. Hamilton (neither armed, fortunately), Lee vs. Grant, Custer vs. Sitting Bull, Mark Twain vs. James Fenimore Cooper, Babe Ruth vs. Ty Cobb, Stephen Foster vs. (the real) Louis Armstrong. By the time Rik-Kuk sold it, to Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s chagrin—it was the reason he’d started wearing those natty bow ties—it had mutated into a quiz show called Wasn’t That Us? which lasted thirty-odd incredible years. So I learned when, numb after a hospital visit during Cadwaller’s long dying, I turned on our (soon my) set and stared briefly at its Eighties iteration, now hosted by an amiable dunce named Mack “Paddy” McMartin. No mean hand at hat tricks himself, the one-term Congressman we’d hardly known had turned District dross into Hollywood gold.

  It wasn’t all like that. If it had been, Gene Rickey’s armlock would’ve soon been partnered by his other arm choking Gerson’s windpipe while leaving him a free hand, and my husband had an inner realist whose job was to keep Noah fed. I don’t much recall any of them, but Tim Cadwaller tells me Molder and Maunder is a good courtroom series, Curt Rasp, FBI has its gangbusting moments, and Here, Biscuit (child star and dog rehashing the myth of Sisyphus in suburbia) is funny as you-scrims for Ike’s grin go. Rik-Kuk’s four Westerns—Giddyup, The Chesterfield Clan, Ten Steps Back, and Lasso—were often a cut above the other twenty or thirty then on the air.