by Peter Davis
That was when Pammy called me. Would I compose (she used that word, as if she were asking for a song) a few lines about Joey for her to say at the funeral? We had met twice, once at a writers’ cocktail party. She had listened attentively to the host; writers love that. She said now she needed to be with her sister and nieces all day and night, and she was too overcome to think. “Poor Joey, poor Elise, poor little girls never to know their generous adoring father.” Shocked, I said it would be an honor to do anything to help. Was she favoring me by asking a favor because she’d heard I’d been assigned to A Doll’s House? “You’re such a consummate dear, Owen,” she said, “I am so désolée.” And so I went off those planks, too. The surf that covered Joey Jouet soaked us all.
The funeral was held on Jubilee’s Stage Three, a red rose garland the size of a wheelbarrow decked in front of the casket. With a few exceptions, nobody who was anybody was there: a stuntman after all. Stuntmen themselves, technicians, and set designers were scattered in folding chairs; a sprinkling of assistant producers showed up. Mossy Zangwill gave the eulogy, blunting criticism of the studio for having laid off Joey the day before his death. He called Joey Jubilee’s own daring young man on the flying trapeze. “We couldn’t exist without men like Joey,” he said. “You can’t make pictures without excitement. You can’t have excitement without stunts, and stunts can’t happen without stuntmen. Joe was the best, and we’ll miss him more than he’ll ever know.”
No one even whispered—why, if he was the best, was Joey Jouet fired?
In the front row, her tears flowing freely, Joey’s widow, Elise Millevoix Jouet, held both her small daughters in her lap. The daughters dazed, the mother inconsolable. I didn’t know yet how inconsolable. Palmyra was too upset to say the sentences I’d written and went right to music. Her voice cracked on the word “wretch” in Amazing Grace. It took less than twenty minutes to turn Stage Three back into the set for Prelude to Murder, for which I’d written a couple of scenes, changing the killer from the conductor to the flutist but keeping the victim in place beneath the cribbage table.
Mossy left alone everyone with the rank of assistant producer or above; all technical workers who attended Joey’s funeral were docked a half day’s pay.
2
The Palmyra Millevoix Booster
Years earlier, on seeing Pammy’s first test, Sam Goldwyn said she couldn’t act, wasn’t beautiful enough, and would make people nervous. “God’s sake, I’ve seen happier statues. Never blinks. Who the hell she think she is, Queen Victoria?” (Which Goldwyn pronounced Bictodia.) He also thought Pammy’s features were too fine and too collected, like Jimmy Cagney’s, toward the center of her face. Passable in Cagney, impossible in a woman. An MGM cameraman came to her rescue, discerning it was only her regal forehead that made Pammy’s features seem low, and he knew how to deal with that. Actresses, especially those past thirty, like to be shot from above so audiences can’t see neck wrinkles or any hint of jowls. Palmyra, still in her twenties when she first came out to be tested, was actually in need of the opposite treatment since she had no wrinkles at all. The MGM cameraman suggested, just before what was to be her second and last test, that she be shot to indulge her features from slightly below her chinline, less like a heroine, more like a goddess. In person, even with several Hollywood years behind her, Palmyra was still so unscathed by makeup and miscasting that eyes flew naturally to her as if she were a nest and the rest of us lost sparrows looking for home.
One afternoon in 1933, Mossy had called me to his office to order press releases on Pammy, the first singing star who was both composer and actress. He didn’t like the valentines that Jubilee’s publicity department was churning out so he’d see what a junior screenwriter might come up with. When I met Miss Millevoix she wasn’t in the negligee female stars affected in their bungalows. She wore a dowdy polkadot housedress and was playing checkers with her six-year-old daughter Millicent. Millie’s first look at me was a scowl. Her mother glanced up and smiled.
“Three games of checkers, Millie!” Palmyra said. “You’ll be beating me by the time you’re, well, eight, no nine, when you’re nine you’ll be three kings up on me before I get one. You know you will.” A reluctant grin sneaked onto Millie’s face. “Costanza?” Palmyra summoned, and a tidy Filipina emerged from the next room. “Time to take Millie home.” The frown that returned to Millie outlasted her mother’s hug and almost became tears when Costanza had her out the door. She stuck her tongue out at me.
“Let’s sing,” were the first words Pammy spoke to me as she headed toward her piano. “I hate a white piano,” she said. “It’s a decoration, not a musical instrument. This one’s left over from Jeanette MacDonald and I hear she didn’t like it either.”
“I can’t,” I said, “I really can’t sing.” “Yes you can,” she said, “do you know any of mine?” “About like I kn-know the n-national anthem,” I stammered. A lie: I was occupied mostly with getting decent script assignments, not memorizing songs.
“You’re supposed to get to know me, Mossy says, so let’s try a few bars, okay?” It was if she were coaxing a child, and I was embarrassed into joining her. “There’s things I do,” she sang and played while I tried to hold her tune, “And things I don’t, And in words of just one syllable, There’s things I will and things I won’t, But can we be Jack and Jillable?” Palmyra went on, not flirting despite the lyrics, and when she sailed past “To the party you’ll be bringable, If you’re Crosby you can be Bingable,” she swung over into a piece of another song that I stayed out of, a jazzy one. “I’ve got a guy, I long to be with’m, He flies higher than all of the birds; I’d give up my melody, harmony and rhythm, If I can just get him to say the right words.” She included a two-measure tag that became a jazz riff at the end.
Pammy medleyed through a few of her hits, and I got the point. My press releases would write themselves after this exclusive recital—these sweet sounds from the voice of a young widowed (was she?) mother bravely carrying on. Treacle spilling from my typewriter. Listening and watching, I was in awe but not in thrall. Something remote about her, not merely professionalism though she had plenty of that, did not invite familiarity. Perhaps it was that she was foreign. A moat surrounded her.
“Negro and Irish singers both do my songs better than I do,” she said.
I saw why. Distance, separation, was important to her. She didn’t take you into her confidence like the black and Irish singers she mentioned. I was invited to hear her sing but not into intimacy with the singer. The best of her music is bone simple, with an air of permissiveness that encourages improvisation by other musicians. Palmyra cradled a song with a voice like smoke, and in her blues and torches I heard the suggestion of pleasure with the certain expectation of pain. When her songs were appropriated by black musicians, as black music had earlier been appropriated by whites, they had more to them. Her melodies beg for the harmonies and cadences that Duke Ellington first gave them and that have been improvised by successors including the rockers.
Perhaps only Mae West, writing scripts for her own movies, was as versatile as Palmyra, a multilingual icon in the musical theaters of Paris and Berlin before she ever came to America. The first time she landed in New York, not long after the Great War, Palmyra had been taken under the wing of Eddie Marks, an old time song plugger from Tin Pan Alley. Marks brought her into the American idiom and got her singing jobs in speakeasies, yet he also weaned her toward ditties that didn’t show her best side. Her novelty tunes had brief currencies, never became standards. But she was getting her American education. She wrote a little number ending with “Yes I’d like to get even, not even with Steven, I’d just like to get even … with you,” a song whose melodic line is as natural as walking. She stayed in New York two years. Possibly because she needed to get away from vaudevillians like Eddie Marks, Palmyra Millevoix was one of the few creative talents who actually improved by migrating from New York to Hollywood.
But that was later. Firs
t she returned to Europe for most of the Twenties. Palmyra knew the expatriate Americans but did not belong with them. She sang in all the continental capitals, and almost as an afterthought she became a mother.
Finishing my private concert in her bungalow, Pammy said, affecting an all-purpose European accent, “Vair can ve go for some absinthe?” Off we went, she still in her polkadot housedress and I in my flapping wide tie and wider lapels, across Venice Boulevard from Jubilee to The Moving Picture Bar, the low-ceilinged studio hangout. We were brought double Scotch sours. Photographs of Jubilee notables, including of course La Millevoix herself, speckled the walls. “So what do you want to know?” she asked.
My eyes bulged. I wanted to know everything. “I suppose to begin at—”
“I was born at Strasbourg, I think,” she laughed, “but make up whatever you like, that’s what I do. Not as old as the century, two years younger than Mossy—but never mind, you’ll make that up too.” Listening to her I did detect some kind of accent, but I couldn’t locate it. “You’ll be torn between having me ten years younger than I am and needing me to be old enough to be the respectable mother of a six-year-old in this year of someone’s lord 1933.”
When she passed quickly over what she called a macabre Belgian convent in Ghent, followed by her finishing school in Switzerland and on to her time in a Berlin cabaret and then to the Paris stage, it occurred to me to ask about her husband.
“Husband?” She looked as though I’d struck her or perhaps used a Sanskrit word she didn’t understand. “Ah, Millie’s father, of course. Tragique, mon cher, tragique. Say what you will. I’ll be amused. Try me,” and she winked, “on my love for America.”
Press releases tumbled from my Royal. Admittedly purple, the words were not about love but enchantment. I typed of how, for her closest friends, Palmyra Millevoix would elide from her own “inimitable” songs into Rudy Vallee’s Vagabond Lover, which she sang low and a little husky, not almost falsetto and defended the way Rudy did. For the signature phrase, “I’m just a vagabond lover,” she brought the words to great length and held them there, roasting her chestnuts until they were done to the crisp she wanted, before she rushed in with, “In search of a sweetheart it seems,” which she sped through as one might rifle a drawer, until she reached the final syllable. She held “seems” for four created notes so listeners would be drinking from her voice as from a fountain in the village square, preparing them for the last words of the song, “The girl of my vagabond dreams.” She held “dreams” until you knew it was a village square you reached after a long, parched pilgrimage, a search, home to the home of your heart.
I was so carried away I made Millicent’s father a daring French aviator dying heroically in the final days of the Great War. Someone in Publicity, which had earlier maintained Millie was a little sister, pointed out that Millicent Millevoix would have to be a teenager if her father were killed in a war that ended fifteen years earlier. I made the father into an Italian nobleman who died when his Bugatti crashed at Le Mans.
What I left out of my press releases was that when Pammy made her way to Hollywood in early 1930 she had been forced to change her name. Palmyra was too ugly, Millevoix too foreign. Her acting name became Pamela Miles. She was shoveled around to several studios until an executive said she obviously couldn’t act but he needed bodies, sounding like a general demanding fresh troops if only for cannon fodder. He insisted she be made a platinum blonde. Pammy herself called her hair dirty blonde, but it carried a trace of animal red; it reflected her features and expressions. Her open gait, legs a little apart—challenging as a no-nonsense honey blonde with russet tones—looked only slutty in platinum blonde. Platinum was just right for Harlow, just wrong for Millevoix. Her flashes of anger, which looked attractively subversive with a wink of humor, were mere petulance in platinum, spoiled petulance at that.
“I don’t know why any of you wanted me at all,” Pammy sighed to a Warner Brothers producer, “when all the studio does is alter me like a dress. They change my name, my nose, my hair, hide my ass, make my breasts look like ice cream cones. The only things you leave alone are my ears and teeth. Everything else you pad, chop or mash.” “Oh no,” her producer told her, “we’ll get to your teeth in good time, have to close that gap between your canines and bicuspids so there’s no space between them when you flash that Grand Canyon smile.”
She made four pictures at Warner Brothers, one silent, three talkies, all turkeys. Then Pamela Miles, heartily sick of what she was doing, walked a picture whose director bullied his actors with bad line readings. After she told the studio the picture was arch and witless, they suspended her. Her agent warned her disobedience in this town is like poison to the Medicis. Warners had their planter call the gossip queen Louella Parsons.
In her column Louella hectored. “Kids these days always know best, but if I were young Miss Miles, fresh from what some call the seedier precincts of the Continent, I would special delivery my lucky bosom back onto the set of Baby Can’t Play pronto if not sooner.” As unjust as she felt the Warners campaign was, Pammy wouldn’t budge. She was through with Pamela Miles. “If Greta Garbo can get away with a name that un-American,” Pammy said, “I may as well fail as myself since I’m a complete disaster as someone else.” She did what other actors and actresses only wished they could do: she went home and wrote a hit. Two actually, under her own name.
“Born Blue” was declamatory, with the tempo of speech but chanted musically, nourished by the Deep South blues she had begun to listen to on what were then called race records. After an up tempo verse that warned listeners, the sweetly mournful chorus:
If you hear this song in a bar or a train,
Put a nickel in the Wurlitzer and play it again:
Born blue, born blue,
That’s me, not you,
You can make me laugh, you can make me cry,
Sometimes you make me want to lie down and die
’Cause I was born blue, it’s always been true.
No matter where I go or what I do
It’s what I know, what I’ve been through,
For I was born, I was born, I was born blue.
She ripped into the last two lines with a blowtorch:
I was born, yes I say born, my heart is torn, Mister blow it on your horn—
’Cause I was born blue.
This became a signature not only for herself but for millions who had the Depression surrounding, defining their lives. Yet Pammy knew a record that was only sad would have a limited appeal to fans who also wanted to kick up their heels and simply sing. She wrote the flip side of “Born Blue” as a playful melody that could be sung anywhere at a party or by a barbershop quartet. Here’s the verse to “Can Sara Wear a Pair ’a Dungarees”:
When I see a pretty girl in tights
I wonder how she spends her days and nights;
Though I really hate to bother
I’ll just have to ask her father
If she can go informal
And still be mostly normal
At the party, it’s the biggest one in town,
On the dance floor if she doesn’t wear a gown.
The crooning chorus was belted by male singers as if they owned it:
Oh,
Can Sara wear a pair ’a dungarees?
I’ll ask it sweetly, I’ll go down upon my knees—
Hear my prayer, Mr. McDougall, I know you’re kinda frugal,
So can Sara wear a pair ’a dungarees?
Mr. Mac said there’ll be rumors
If she don’t stay in her bloomers;
This ain’t what me and Pearl
Had in mind for our little girl,
So Sara wears no pair ’a dungarees.
But Mr. Mac, when Sara’s gone to college
Where profs impart the knowledge
And parcel out those bachelorette degrees—
She’s bound to want to wear a—
And I’ll take care of Sara
If you’ll only listen to my fervent pleas:
When she’s gone off to Bryn Mawr
With Aunt Sadie’s kid Lenore,
Sure then Sara wears a pair ’a dungarees.
For its time the song was slightly risqué, just edgily modern, since it did assert the right of women to wear pants. After Pammy’s record came out, Eddie Cantor quickly followed with his own version (of course, he wouldn’t touch “Born Blue”; Bing Crosby did but his jaunty recording didn’t attempt the anguish in Pammy’s) and for a while Rudy Vallee had more requests to sing about Sara in her dungarees than even “The Whiffenpoof Song,” his own standard. Pammy was bringing in over sixty thousand dollars a month from both songs during their heyday.
There was a problem trying to start a motion picture career over again, but the solution became Mossy Zangwill and Jubilee Pictures, which bought her contract from Warners in late 1931.
In quick succession, the reborn Palmyra Millevoix played Mary Queen of Scots; a war-widowed singing mother struggling to make it on Broadway (art imitating life imitating art, in my attempted legend); and an English doctor trying to wipe out a plague in India where, naturally, she meets Ronald Colman.
Her star had risen. By 1934 she was who women wanted to be. And men wanted.