by Peter Davis
Obligingly, I drove with the script fifty or so miles east to Red Woods, as Pammy called her country retreat above Upland in the foothills of Mount Baldy. Red Woods was not only her haven but was also far enough from Beverly Hills so that she was normally unbothered on weekends by the likes of me. On the radio Pammy was singing “I never have found where’s the good in goodbye.” I turned it off, a reminder of Mossy’s party.
I was approaching Pammy’s home essentially an attendant squire. Yes, I was a writer, took myself for one, but I was also twenty-four and had in three years exactly one and one half screen credits on two movies, forgotten as soon as they were released, The Vamp of Louisville and Lost Archipelago. I’d been the first writer on no movie, and all the scripts I’d worked on had been re-assigned to other writers after me. Dunster Clapp or Seaton Hackley or Colonel DeLight, anyone in a supervisory capacity at Jubilee, could tell me to do anything and I’d do it to keep the $275 a week—a hundred a week more than when I began—flowing. A Doll’s House would be my breakthrough, if the deconstruction of a masterpiece into a feel-good ninety minutes could be said to constitute a breakthrough. Still, I raked my work up through bloody visions as much as Ibsen did, or Brecht for that matter, soon to arrive in Hollywood himself. Feeling always an outsider, as much as any of them I plied the exile’s vain trade: expectant, desperate.
Pammy was with two friends baking on the flagstones by her pool. I wanted them to notice me, I wanted them to ignore me. The three women were so obviously enjoying themselves I felt worse than an intruder, more like a burglar of their space.
“So that left only the sister in the Alfa Romeo,” one of them was saying.
“Can’t believe it, honey,” said one of the others. “Ah’m given to mistakes mahsef, as y’all know bitter’n innybuddy in this town, but I nevah even dreamed about doin’ that.”
“She never told any of that to me,” said Pammy, the third sunbather. “So I guess we know who she trusts.”
“And who she dudn’t trust fuhther’n she kin th’ow a nekkid rhino.”
Three kinds of laughter from three sylphs—throaty, giggly, almost a cackle.
Identifiable from a distance only by their manes, the three were honey-blonde, auburn, and blonder-than-blonde, more platinum than Harlow. “Race, isn’t it?” I said as I approached under the canopy of wisteria vines that led to the pool, which was partially shaded by a giant cork oak. “Excuse me for the interruption, Pammy, but Dunster Clapp urgently wanted you to see a script before you go in tomorrow. Pardon me, Teresa, I’ll only be a minute.” If I’d thought my use of the familiar Race would somehow self-welcome me into their company, my apologetic stance immediately afterward effectively confirmed me as Messenger, Errand Boy, Stooge.
Actresses in those days were seen as sleeping beauties awakened from anonymity by the shrewdness of a male producer or director who would see their promise and mold it, bring them in from the chill of poverty that grew them. On the road from obscurity to celebrity they’d have a number of benefactors, some of whom, yes, they’d sleep with, all of whom brought them along. Essentially, they were dependent colonies of an imperial power that gradually prepared them for a degree of autonomy.
The so-called discovery of auburn-haired Teresa Blackburn did not feature her sipping a Coke in a drugstore but knocking, fairly beating, on the door of any assistant casting director who would listen to her sing, watch her dance, or sit still as she read a scene from Maxwell Anderson or Shaw. It turned out she couldn’t sing a lick, but she could tear off a line of dialogue and spit it back so it rent the air. Pammy prized Teresa for having clawed her way to a level not far below where Pammy had arrived almost by accident—the European exception that proved the American rule—and she admired Teresa’s Scottish class rage at people who came by their luck easily including Pammy herself. Teresa and her ballplaying brother Stubby were both outcomes of liquid evenings between feckless parents who couldn’t, in the phrase of the day, rub two nickels together, and who stayed with each other only long enough to breed. In a sense Pammy and Teresa educated each other, Pammy inducting Teresa into sophistication, Teresa showing Pammy what life was like in the promised land for those who had little promise.
The third actress around the pool—described in story conferences as the slutty flirt—was Rachel Honeycut, whom I knew from her having gone around with an actor pal of mine as he was making a name for himself in gangster pictures. In any gathering of women Race, as she was called, would be the first one to be noticed. Women as well as men would gape at her almost-white hair, her breathy Hello, her mouth in a perpetual kissing contour somewhere between a pout and a pucker.
Race was from declined gentility whose principle toil was to stay on the right side of the law in Greenville, Mississippi. In her late teens she’d fled west toward anything destiny would put in her path, which was generally hard-luck men with schemes they didn’t believe themselves but could sell to a Deep Southern naïf. She bounced around town for a year until she actually was discovered in a drugstore, though it was at the prescription counter. A silents producer, pushed to the sidelines less by the advent of talkies than his involvement in a horse doping scandal, had been Race’s first significant Hollywood boyfriend. She was trying to buy cheap sleeping pills and he was angling for more elegant barbiturates when they no sooner met than shared chemicals. He introduced her to a cameraman and that was all it took since no one could see Race without wanting to photograph her. She had a successful test before the week was out, and in 1933 signed with Jubilee to play a party girl in a New Orleans saloon.
While her spirit soared—she had two photographs above her bed in her little Hollywood apartment, Andrew Jackson and Marie Curie, the southern populist and the female scientist—her flesh had another agenda. Race was soon sniffing, swallowing, and injecting her boyfriend’s pharmacopoeia, and the boyfriend was shortly after that hitting her for real and imagined offenses against what might generously be termed their relationship. Making a picture with Race at Jubilee, Pammy and Teresa rescued her, but a pattern was established.
They had warned Race not even to have dinner with the songwriter Cyrus Henscher, who was scoring her current picture. Henscher’s penchant was to charm and then brutalize women. Race went along to dinner with him anyway after he waddled up to her one day and told her he couldn’t get her out of his mind. He waddled not because he was obese—he was only paunchy—but because his feet splayed out like a duck’s. Race justified the date by saying she could help the songsmith reform, exactly what Cy Henscher had no interest in doing. A squat middleweight, Henscher caromed from one studio to another writing songs and mistreating women.
Henscher sang Race a tune over dessert, ending with, “I promise you my banger/ Reposes in its hangar/ Until summoned by the loveliest of humans;/ I’m just a lonely lover/ As I hope you will discover/ Though I wish I were a song by Vincent Youmans.”
Race yielded. Henscher was sweet to her, even sexually considerate, the first evening. Naturally, Race saw him again. This time he took her to a hotel in downtown Los Angeles. It would be more romantic, he told her. When they were upstairs in their room, Henscher produced from his suitcase a three-foot length of hose. Before Race could react the brute had bolted the door. In the taxi she took to Pammy’s home afterward, Race had to balance on her knees since she could neither sit down nor lean against the seat. As Pammy applied cold cream to her body, Race told her Henscher had warbled a macabre ditty about welts and bruises as he lashed her, then chortled.
“Son of a bitch won’t get away with this,” Pammy vowed. But she knew the police were thoroughly uninterested in domestic affairs where there were no witnesses, and Henscher was soon off to Paramount, out of whatever reach Pammy had at Jubilee. Of course, I didn’t know any of this then.
The women by the pool were not exactly pining for a male presence that Sunday. Men don’t get it, especially well behaved young men as I was, men whose presence normally elicits a smile, that women do not nece
ssarily require our company. It had been only a few weeks since the Henscher assault, of which I remained cheerfully ignorant. As I stood trying not to gape at Pammy’s and Teresa’s skimpy two-piece bathing suits that had reached Hollywood from the south of France, wondering why Race, not known for her modesty, was wearing a suit that fully covered her, I assumed I’d drop the script I’d arrived with and withdraw quickly. The fact that the actresses were polite relaxed me more than it should have. Pammy was cordial enough on the hot afternoon to ask me if I’d care to swim, and like the fool I was I said, “Sure, that’d be swell.”
“Race and I have to get back to town,” Teresa said before I could alter my course, and the two melted away.
Reading the script Dunster Clapp had sent while I swam guiltily, Pammy sat on a lounge chair under an umbrella. She had put on reading glasses but didn’t look all that interested, skipping pages, doubling back, chuckling a couple of times though altogether her focus was desultory. “They want to make fun of the Depression and rich people at the same time,” she said as I dried off. “Mr. Capra and Mr. Riskin know how to do that, but Benges and Spighorr shouldn’t be left in the same room with typewriters.”
“I’ll take it right back with me,” I offered, “and give it to Dunster in the morning.
“That would be nice, Owen. I’ll have to skim the rest I guess.”
I kept silent but looked at her, the legendary thirty-ish woman (thirty-two to be exact) of experience with the kid who would have tripped over his shoelaces any minute except he was barefoot. I did not look at Palmyra Millevoix with lust, only awe.
“You’re basically an interrogator aren’t you, Owen,” she said without looking up. “I trust you though.”
I stammered. “I-I haven’t asked you anything, have I?”
“No, but it’s all there. You’re a pack rat with other people’s lives. I remember you in my bungalow to do publicity. Your questions were not professional as much as they were constitutional. Curiosity is your natural posture, isn’t it?”
“I always want to know more than I do, if that’s what you mean.”
Without another word, Pammy moved off her chaise and was in the swimming pool before I could breathe again. She disappeared beneath the surface, invisible because of the sunlight flaring off the pool into my eyes. I supposed I wouldn’t see her again. She’d never been more than a fantasy anyway, a figment of the collective imagination. When she reappeared at the deep end, she threw her head back and smiled. I didn’t see her take a breath before she plunged again, but what was mere air to her? She swam back and forth a few more times, now submerged, now planing the surface. When she climbed out and wrapped herself in a towel, I felt I should have held it for her, but that would have been both too subservient and too familiar.
“We have to help Race,” Pammy said when she sat down again. “She’s out of luck. If you have a chance to do something for her, do it. If it’s a bit part, make it bigger. If you see her in the commissary trapped by some pig, butt in and be your awkward self until she can escape. We need to guard her a little.” She didn’t say why; I didn’t dare ask.
“Sure,” I said. Even if she was only using me, her saying We made my pulse skip.
“Sit down. Hollywood’s even crazier than the rest of the world thinks, isn’t it.”
It wasn’t a question so I didn’t answer.
“Not that the rest of the world is sane. Italy and Germany are two countries I love, and they’re out of their minds.” Pammy had the morning paper in front of her, but she wasn’t so much reading it as bouncing off it. “Oh, this is fine for Europeans, who have warfare and disputed borders in their veins, but hamburger Americans … what will happen to us—I’m almost one of us now—when we get vacuumed into all this?”
She seemed to have accepted my presence in a way, and in another way was talking to herself. Something had shifted when she looked at the newspaper.
I glanced at her and she was again famous to me. When she said she trusted me she meant that she knew I’d do her bidding. I was a capon, and I hoped it was only a disguise. Hardly auditioning for Prince Charming, I was an attendant the court had sent to badger her on her one day off. She was complaining about international affairs to me, but I could have been her hairdresser or Millie’s nursemaid, Costanza. She had been so personal, so at home and at ease with Teresa and Race; now she was famous again, as she had been at Mossy’s party.
“Play tag, Uncle Owen?” Finished with her nap, Millie had come down to the pool. She’d seen me a few times at the studio, where she resented my intrusions on her time with her mother, but on her own ground I was accorded the status of a familiar. Play tag was the last thing I wanted to do, but I began chasing the seven-year-old miniature of her mother around the pool. That was part of her mother’s fame, too: you had to do what her kid wanted because she was Palmyra Millevoix. I was rescued from this chore by the announcement from Costanza that Bruce Sanders had dropped in.
“Help me,” Pammy said. “Stay right here, close.” Sanders had been a beau of Pammy’s briefly during her Pamela Miles period. I didn’t like the grasping fellow, a middling actor who worked sporadically in pictures about armies or athletes. With this new social assignment I understood I was still a capon, only now I was to be part of the shield Pammy held up to ward off the unwelcome swain. Costanza scooped up Millie.
Pammy pulled her lounge chair so close to me it appeared we were in an intense private conversation that would render any third party an intruder. If only.
Sanders was a cocky guy, his hair peroxided to help him play halfbacks and doughboys when he was a decade and a half too old for those parts. He made a jaunty approach under the wisteria canopy, yawing his head from side to side as he sailed toward us. When he padded across the flagstones, accompanied by a haughty salivating pointer, Pammy was leaning toward me with her throaty chuckle sharing a presumed intimacy though in fact what she had just said, looking at a headline, was that Mussolini was a pretty fair showman but he was in danger of forgetting he was only in a show.
Pammy did not rise to greet the visitor. His self-righteous pointer made things worse for Bruce Sanders by starting to drink out of the pool. “Unless your dog’s stomach is made out of glass,” Pammy said, “the chlorine in there will eat right through it.”
“Heel, Brutus!” Sanders yelled, and after he repeated his order several times and swatted the dog, Brutus reluctantly gave up the pool. “He’s not half the canine his father was,” Sanders said, and then, attempting a little historical familiarity, the actor added, “You remember Brutus’s father, Pam?”
“I recall you had a big spiteful dog.” Pammy wrinkled her nose as she said this.
Brushing off the remark, Sanders squinted at me. “Jant, isn’t it? Still doing heavy lifting for Zangwill?”
“Something like that.”
“Actually,” Pammy said, “he’s too modest to say so, but Owen will be writing the next Garbo picture as soon as Mossy can spring her from Metro.”
“Oh, uh, LB will never let go of her.” Sanders had not stopped cocking his head from side to side as if this gave him both stature and credibility. “I’m starting at Warners myself in a couple of weeks. Dieterle wants me at eight hundred per.”
Which, even in the Thirties, was birdseed for a Hollywood actor, and Pammy tore right into it. “Wow,” she said, “no telling what you can do with that, Bruce.”
“After the first picture my agent tells me it can be tripled.”
Still birdseed to a star like Pammy. She raised her eyebrows so they formed little arcs above her reading glasses, which she had kept on. She affected a kind of thoughtful calculation. “That would be wonderful, Bruce. Of course, with twenty-five hundred a week your hands are sort of tied, aren’t they?”
“What do you mean?” Sanders stumbled gullibly onward.
“Well, you can do some things, but you can’t do others. I mean, you could have a little plane, or you could have a big boat, but not both, right
?”
Sanders was miserable. He didn’t yet have the eight hundred a week, maybe he was blowing smoke anyway about Bill Dieterle, and here was his former girlfriend, now a movie star, telling him that even if he makes three times what he does not yet make, he’s still below the level of her eyesight. Not quite defeated, he tried advancing again into the historical familiar. “Speaking of boats, we had one helluva sweet time going over to Catalina on that Coast Guard launch, didn’t we? How about doing that again, Pam?”
Pammy winced at the memory and thrust back her own historical unfamiliar. “Bruce, you went around for a short while with a bland studio creation named Pamela Miles, someone invented to feed candy to audiences with a sweet tooth for the unreal. You did not go out with, or even know, Palmyra Millevoix. Let’s leave it at that.”
“I, uh, guess I shouldn’t have dropped in. We were on our way to Alta Loma, Brutus and I, female show dog there ready to be bred, and we thought, or I mean I—”
“Take care of yourself, Bruce.”
The belittled actor and his slobbering dog slunk away to do their reproducing in a more hospitable meadow.
Pammy took off her reading glasses. “I know I was awful to him, I’ll get Mossy or Harry Cohn or someone to give him a couple of weeks’ work.”