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

by Carson, Tom

  Even though it cost me a marriage—and would it be a happy ending if I’d kept him unhappy? Sorry, I’m not that big a narcissist—I wouldn’t have missed seeing Israel in 1956 for the world. I wouldn’t presume to articulate what its existence back then meant to most Jews, much less “the” Jews. Nor am I the one to fathom what its existence must’ve meant and still does to most Egyptians, Palestinians, Syrians, and so on. I do know what it meant to some of us goyim, especially if we hailed from Los Angeles.

  How could we not catch our breaths? Never mind Hollywood. Israel was the greatest movie any bunch of impatient Jews ever created, a cinematic masterwork. And it was real.

  I know for fact that attitude used to drive a lot of Israelis nuts. Yet my second husband was not only, as he’d said, American, but a filmmaker. Even with Nachum ben Zion as his caustic best friend, eleven years of living there never knocked the awed Panavision out of him. Who are you to say it should have? Aliyah.

  Noah Gerson died in June ’67. He was shot through the head by a sniper just hours after the documentary unit under his command had photographed something not seen in two thousand years: Jews praying at the Wailing Wall. They were young Israeli paratroopers with slung Uzis, but they were there and so was Noah. The world gasped at those images of history resurrected on film.

  The ben Zions sent me the picture printed in Haaretz and taken sometime earlier that day. Halfway out of a jeep, Noah’s wearing something he never did in Hollywood: sunglasses. His right hand, slightly blurred, is reaching for what may be a candy bar. His smile could part the Dead Sea.

  You won’t understand, but I knew him. I can’t regret it happened when it did: I mean, before. Before too many displaced Arabs, too few Americans, and a good many Israelis, Nachum ben Zion sardonically in the forefront, started wrestling with the fact that history resurrected wasn’t history redeemed. Before the fulfillment of all his hopes my Noah filmed at what I know was the happiest moment of his life turned so sour.

  Before the Panavision epic he loved and loved living in got degraded into an endless, relentless TV series, its production values unimproved by the abandonment of the early seasons’ rousing black and white for muddy, perplexing color and its travesty of Hamlet with any number of real corpses unresolved by the emergence in Israeli politics of any number of Gene Rickeys. (To Bibi or not to Bibi, that is the question.) Before Nachum ben Zion said the hell with it and ended up dying in New Jersey. Before even Noah would’ve had to face knowing his Israel had started down the gray road to becoming, as the United States has or must and even California may, just another country.

  Part Two

  1. Lucky for the Sun

  Posted by: Pamtonia Fraser

  I’d been living in Paris a few weeks when a book by Pamela Buchanan about Marie Antoinette thrummed in my head one wet morning, flapping little dust-jackety wings. That should tell you two things, the more obvious being that Paris is one unignorable city. Try to demote it to a mere environment and it’ll just crawl in your ear as you snooze à l’Américaine. The other is that, nine months later and counting, getting over my second marriage had its up days and down days.

  Unless you count a private title whose silliness should’ve warned me I was belling too many cats for comfort—La Brioche, C’est Moi—not a word of it got written. Until festive Cadwallers’ voices crowded a speakerphone and Tim’s news knocked me off my game, I hadn’t thought of that phantom book in decades. Having put mimsies and Rheumas to work checking imdb.com, I see the movie’s derived from some other broad’s bio instead. Oh her.

  A title, a marriage to last year’s Nobelist. A dozen fat tomes ruing their old lives as trees. No doubt a mansion or two stuffed up some pastoral cleft in Dickinham or Stropshire. Some women still can’t stop grasping at trophies.

  Was she invited to the set at Versailles? Would you like to meet our star, your Ladyhood? Pretend to flip through the script, meanwhile licking your lips as she kicks a leg, buries mirth in her prayers, tips laughing wheat and rye sideways in a honeyed tumble? Then jumps up and offers you strawberry pancakes—Ard, I’ll fix later—while pretending she’ll ever care who you are? No, she’s not oblivious to those cobras in your Ladyhooded eyes. Not only do you overrate your own subtlety by a mile, but your prey is much brighter than anyone thinks. She’s just indifferent, your Ladyhood—indifferent.

  Kirsten, at least I was American! Pardon me as I scoot back my wheelchair, set aside Cadwaller’s gun, and frog-march this old bag’s indignant kidneys on a tour of the rug. If the White House calls before I simmer down, I’ll give Potus elephonic pink and gray things blasting like a bucket of soggy confetti made of vomit and worms. Hell, I may not tell him it’s a protest or even greet the man first, just leave him puzzled and deaf in one ear.

  Yes, Ard: that’s just one more reason to stick with my new pal Pink in the landing craft. Too depressing to creep like anybody into a District theater to see Marie Antoinette in October, knowing that if I’d played my cards right I could’ve been at Cannes in May. Champagne with Kirsten before I paraded amid bigger, more golden bubbles of music up the red carpet on her perfumed arm—only, of course, because I’m so doddery and she’s as sweet as she is talented. Honestly, what else could it be?

  Posted by: Pam

  Beyond Paris and self-pity—and on the second count, I might as well have called the thing Vainglory Be—I can spot several reasons for Pam’s impulse to pop Marie Antoinette between hard covers. One: I’d turned thirty-seven, Antoinette’s age when she died. That had been on an October day probably not too unlike those I saw previewed in each wind’s flips of wet leaves on my walks in the Luxembourg Gardens, not far from the flat Pam had rented in the rue St. Sulpice.

  Two: I was twice-divorced damaged goods, had good cause to think my female charms were themselves now ancien régime. Remember, I’d just spent eight years in Hollywood. At thirty-five, actresses who fell short of beautiful started mud-wrestling for the chance to play Thelma, the heroine’s cranky old well-weathered maid.

  Three. The most obvious cue shouted from every train schedule that included Brussels. At the age of thirty-seven, which I knew dead Daisy would be much happier to hear styled “the same age as Marie Antoinette” while leaving her daughter out of it, my mother’d put a gun in her mouth to play lollipow.

  Never written, my Antoinette would have been my third book. Had I done it right, however, it would’ve been the first by Daisy’s daughter. By now I felt I’d done enough living of my own to absorb that role without feeling swiftly exiled to tininess, oafish feet clumping on stairs and a gluey maternal disappointment cowling my every wail.

  For one thing, I was old enough to understand Daisy’s chagrin was provoked not by what kind of daughter she had but the fact that she had one; still had one. A less thoughtless, more loving, less selfish child would’ve vanished along with the polo-dispatched proto-Potus who left her a widow and still smirks in scalloped photographs in the Paris footlocker.

  After closing up what was left of my life in Los Angeles (discharging Luz and Ava was no fun: I might as well have had to tell them Gerson had died), then spending some meaningless months in New York—Pameata’s for-old-times’-sake fling with beflabbed Eddie Whitling still makes me shudder—I’d come to France with a very different program. When Cath Charters pressed me on Glory Be’s sequel, I’d looked at the cup from Rheims on her desk and started talking about Americans in Paris during the Revolution: Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, our envoys. Plus John Paul Jones, a favorite of mine long before I met his fellow sailor Cadwaller. As eager as my agent not to repeat the long drought between Nothing and Glory, I thought I was improvising.

  As usual, I wasn’t. Having lost a husband to Israel, Pam was probably looking for her own other country. Besides, I had a notion of doing a whole cluster of histories that would depend on the Revolution for interest and point without ever confronting July 4 di
rectly. I’d pay a circuitous tribute to Herman Melville’s profundity in a letter to Evert Duyckinck—“The Declaration of Independence makes a difference”—by never dealing head-on with the white whale staring every last one of my readers in the face.

  What vanity I had then, bikini girl! I’m glad I gave up that scheme. To be honest, as a writer I think I’ve had a few innings. Still, your Gramela could never have sustained an approach that refractive for tale after tale, alluding obsessively to a heart of the matter I refused to call by name even once. I was probably seduced into thinking I could do anything by Cath’s green nails tapping the baptismal cup she still used for mint juleps.

  Despite missing out on a Guggenheim as I’d missed out on the Pulitzer, I had enough Glory Be royalties to convince even a Frenchman I could sign a year’s lease. La gloire américaine was in bookstores by then, not that it did well in translation. No great surprise and, by my lights, a bit of a compliment.

  Definition of mon quartier’s welcome to the former Ram-Pam-Pam: for the first month or so, I used to strip with the shades up just for company. In nothing but heels and biology’s clover, the Americaness dared the Tour Eiffel’s tip to come get me: “Red rover, red rover, send Juliette right over.” Anytime I came home from seeing that odd goddess sing in a nightclub, I’d’ve had her stripped in a handclap to let me lavish one lonesome fan’s gratitude. You kidding?

  I wasn’t completely marooned. A few Yank reporters Eddie and I had palled around with when Europe was the ETO were now based in Paris as foreign correspondents, bemusedly following the spectacle of a drunken Marianne playing Hamlet that was the French Fourth Republic in slow-motion free fall. To keep my hand in as I mulled the elusiveness of my newly fugitive book—Antoinette or John Paul?—I knocked out a piece for Roy on the parliamentary debates during that fall’s five-week governmental vacuum, including the session where I finally saw Janet Flanner plain. Just not too plain, since the doyenne’s harsh visage kept her as unapproachable in person as Pam’s somewhat rusty reportage in Regent’s was to hers in The New Yorker.

  I can’t remember who invited me to the party in honor of Lady Diana. (No, Pan—not your much mourned Diana. This one was a different kettle of tiaras.) It certainly wasn’t the hostess in person, since I was as negligible to her social set as I was dwarfed by Janet Flanner in print. Primarily known as a TV producer’s ex-wife who’d written a bestseller—which there were a lot of in those days—I wasn’t out of the club, just no trophy.

  If l’équipe weren’t feeling pressed for time, I’d e-mail Tim to see if he has a clue whose arm I swept in on, since Tim and not Pam is the keeper of Cadwaller’s datebooks. Hopsie wasn’t much on the old Proustian tapestry, but a jotted “Met Pam B., brought by [???]” might appear.

  When I say costume party, Panama, you shouldn’t picture later generations’ sloppy Halloweens, where the ambitious guest is dressed as a giant beer can and someone in more of a rush scribbles a hasty mustache under his or her nose as if that’s all you need to be Proust. They were galas, much mulled by all hands before one’s final choice of Josephine or Athenaïs de Montespan knocked one’s checkbook off balance like a staggered boxer. Our hostess had rented her arrondissement’s foremost relic of ancien régime vainglory, now a Boucher-and-Fragonardy art museum whose hall of mirrors, mimicking Versailles’s less palatially, was for hire in the evenings. That semi-public venue would account for Pam’s inclusion in the guest list, since I certainly never saw the inside of our hostess’s home. In my whorily Hollywoodized way, I might’ve rifled her correspondence, stolen some incredibly precious gem she’d left lying around in plain sight.

  My best chance of identifying my mystery escort would be to recall his disguise, but Pink Thing’s archives have gone fluky there too. False mustache, director’s megaphone, priest’s soutane, or sans-culotte’s cap? Anyhow, I’m positive Pam’s date wasn’t the mock Talleyrand I saw early on, ostentatiously hobbling and caned to draw attention to the lame foot the real Bishop of Autun had the poise to trivialize.

  Watching the counterfeit clump by on parquet that gleamed like Parkay, I remembered my favorite quotation from his model. Oddly, it’s Tim Cadwaller’s and Sean Finn’s too, even though Tim’s no more a reactionary than I am and Sean’s deepest beliefs may be a puzzlement even to him. It’s the only admission of nostalgia that shrewd voyager through multiple regimes ever allowed himself: “Only those who lived before the Revolution know how sweet life can be.”

  Pam’s own choice of costume was dramatic to no one but me. How many people here would even know I didn’t doll up like this every day? It had still gone through several demolitions. I’d thought of the obvious choice first, then eyed my mirror in earnest and accepted that five foot ten of flat-chested me couldn’t do Marie Antoinette. Maybe in print, but not in person.

  To try John Paul Jones would’ve been mischievous, especially with a male escort. But he’d have had to be an old friend for the stunt not to rock him with social unease, and I had none of those on this continent. Finally, in an ambivalent nod to now shuttered Chignonne’s—Cassandre had tried to keep it going, but educationally, grief is no selling point—I went as the Madwoman of Chaillot. Paste diamonds from Madame De’s, a wild wig from La Ronde, a wild gown I was assured by some fool at the Marché aux Puces had been worn by Lola Montez. If it had and it could have been verified, I couldn’t’ve afforded it.

  Max! That was his name. An émigré I’d met in Hollywood. Introduced, Pink Thing now tells me, by Barbara bel Geddes on the set of Caught. What was he doing in Paris? What was his last name, who had he come as? Tim, can’t you help?

  I found Buchwald dressed as a Pilgrim, a self-amused self-advertisement. Already a classic, his column’s Frenchification of the first Thanksgiving—oh, Panama, haven’t you ever read it? Your dad did at ten and nearly choked laughing—was due for its by now traditional Herald Trib reprint. Along with the hornrims that always reminded me of two TV sets who’d decided to get married and give birth to his nose, his unrepentant cigar under his Kilometres Deboutish headgear first marred, then produced the effect.

  We scarcely knew each other, but he was in a genial mood even for him. “Pam! Is that you under those stormy chickens?” he bawled in his Bronx ice-cream mixer of a voice. “You know, one of these days you’re going to have to tell the rest of us poor Americans what you’re really up to! Every one of us is trapped here like a fly in amber, but not you. We all know the Qua-tree-ème Hooray-Pooh-bleak isn’t long for this world, but you don’t look like the deathbed type. What gives?”

  “Why, I—if you really want to know, I’m putting together a book about American diplomats and sailors in Paris,” I said, still my standard answer when pressed. Even Cath hadn’t heard about my project’s bosomy but shadowy alternative. You somehow don’t want to confess you’re thinking of gluing Marie Antoinette’s head back on for a smooch through a hole in the calendar until you’ve got a reasonable-sounding, unrevealing explanation for why.

  He chortled. “Don’t you think you’d better meet a few first? You’ll change your mind in a heckuva hurry. Like I keep telling you, we’re the ones trapped here. Trapped here! Lafayette, Indiana, we are trapped here. Send help, for God’s sake.”

  “Not from now,” I said. “Then.”

  Switching to the Matchmaker Channel, he blinked happily. “Then I’ve got just the man for you. Follow me! Gangway! Bande-chemin. Let’s see some hornpipe there, De Grasse. Merci. Merci-donnant.”

  Even if you don’t happen to be the author of a book whose opening chapter describes a landfall at Provincetown, you don’t disobey a stogie-smoking Pilgrim with TV sets for eyes. In my mad gown, stormy chickens slipping down over my vision at one step before they bucked at my next, I followed him. Imagine my feelings when Miles Standish parted kings and queens and led me to John Paul Jones.

  Who, unlike Pam’s impish facilitator, had taken eno
ugh care with his costume to be smoking a clay pipe, not one of his usual briars. Who, as Pam needed under ten minutes to conclude, must rank up with the dullest, most pedantic, irritatingly self-satisfied (about what, good Lord? The chance to cover his follicularly challenged dome with a tricorn? The subsequent opportunity to point out to me, the author of Glory Be, that Jones was unlikely to have gone wigged at sea?) pompous asses I’d ever met.

  Whose surprise request for my phone number—God, hadn’t he hated me as much as I hated him?—had me privately strangling stormy chickens at the thought he might use it. Panama, meet your great-grandfather.

  Posted by: Pam

  Briar-piped and so bereft above the ears of anything to interest a barber that I scanned the sky for pigeons anytime his fedora was doffed, Cadwaller looked more himself in a dark suit by daylight. So did most Paris Americans.

  When I’d last seen the city, my compatriots and I had been most identifiable by our helmets and cunt caps, our khaki and olive drab, our jangle of leggings and jeeps and bazookas. A dozen years later, sober business attire was the giveaway, distinguishable from its European equivalents by its refusal to be considered, evaluated, rebuked, or in any way interpreted as fashion. I didn’t notice how carefully Cadwaller’s version of the American funeral accommodated European views by retaining two features they could grant had style—first by clarifying itself as a choice, second by being expertly made—until I fell in love with him.

  By my final trip there—in the Nine-teen Nine-ties, Panama, not long before your dad started going each spring—too many of the Americans I saw were shouting our well-known uncle’s name by looking and above all sounding as if they’d given up on the fat farm a month before breaking out of the funny one. At times I regretted my old schoolgirl uniform’s local mufti, but by then I was past the age of nationality. Nobody gives a rap what country women in their seventies are from, since we all look pretty much alike and everyone knows which country we’re heading to.