Girl of My Dreams

by Peter Davis

  In a crowded cavern above the actresses’ dressing rooms I counted twenty-eight coffee-skinned women, about half hunched over their Singers, the other half stitching by hand. One of them got up to see what I wanted. She was short and had the flat-nosed impassive features of Mayan sculpture. Her Spanish accent was so heavy I had to ask her to repeat several things. She said there were thirty-five sewing muchachas and some weren’t in yet. They worked twelve hours a day and were paid forty cents an hour. They were not allowed out of the building or even downstairs. If anyone saw them they were told to say they were studio maids. “We send most what we make home,” the woman said, meaning Mexico. “To get enough to eat we need night jobs too, or husbands, but most husbands are on the other side. Some wait for us in Tijuana on Sunday.”

  I’d heard of the women in the nineteenth century coming off farms to work as virtual serfs in the New England mills (the mills Nils Maynard and his boyhood friend had briefly run away to), and everyone learned in school about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 in New York, but this hot room was a page out of a history I thought was past. I judged the workers here to range in age from about thirteen to forty looking like sixty. “Our fingers fly all day,” my informal guide told me, “or we be fire. Fire by the Colonel.” They brought their lunches in the little brown bags I saw by each machine, and if they forgot or didn’t have a nickel for a couple of tortillas, the Colonel would have leftovers sent in from the commissary, accompanied by a dock in the women’s pay.

  So this was another of Colonel DeLight’s jobs, getting the Mexican women’s fingers to fly the way he did with the writers, who also did piecework and could be bounced off the lot if their fingers didn’t fly fast enough. But don’t go too far with that one, I reminded myself, because all the writers have cars and some have pools and servants who are probably sisters of these women.

  The women sewed all the actresses’ clothing that wasn’t bought or rented from Western Costume. Since Jubilee was lightly sprinkled with union sympathizers, Reds and Red-leaners in 1934, Mossy wanted this covey of serfs kept invisible. I wondered how Elena Frye felt about these women, if she even knew they were on the lot. And Pammy. Pammy couldn’t have known because she’d have nailed Mossy if she had. The stars were dressed in their bungalows and seldom came to the wardrobe building.

  “Looking for something, Sonny?” I turned and saw Colonel DeLight twitching his mustache at me from the top of the stairs. “Wandered a bit off course here, haven’t we?” Slapping his pantleg, the Colonel beckoned me as he would a sheepdog and, like one of those loyally trainable creatures, I trotted over to his side. “Private quarters, Owen my boy,” he said, “no one comes up here without my say-so.”

  Large boom-voiced courtly southern Colonel Ambrose DeLight was often playful in his husbandry of writers and liked to joke he was really only in charge of keeping them sober. “Ah’m jes’ a towel boy in a whorehouse, gents,” he’d say as he walked down the hall. “Now you boys have all the fun you want, but no drinkin’ around the typewriters between lunch and five-thirty, hear?” He’d be answered by a chorus of “Whatever you say, Massa,” which would set the typewriters to clacking furiously, and the Colonel would call out, “That’s what I like—a good bunch of liars. Haw!” Or else, on a bad day when one writer’s ego had been lanced by Mossy, two more had been fired, three others replaced, he’d yell, “Awright boys, enough gloom, le’s have us some fun, what’s post time for the first race at Santa Anita?” And off several of us would go, piling into the Colonel’s ancient Hudson. “A heart has been located in his anatomy,” said his fellow southerner Yancey Ballard, “but it’s fashioned from buffed ivory.”

  I followed the Colonel down the stairs without looking back at the woman in the sewing cavern who’d been speaking to me. “Look, Colonel,” I said in the stairwell, “This is plain slave labor and you know it.” As soon as I said slave I remembered where the Colonel was from; he might not regard slavery unbenignly. He probably had a granddaddy who owned dozens of people. I added didactically, “These conditions are not what America tolerates in the twentieth century.”

  “Wrong all day long, Sonny,” he said, draping a proprietary arm around my shoulder, “They ain’t complaining, are they? And they ain’t starving, are they? Which is what a lot of other wetbacks are doing in this year of Our Lord. So let it rest.”

  “But this studio is rich, there are people here who take home thousands a week. The way you keep these women is cruel, and you and Mossy know that. It’s not human.”

  “Wrong again. That’s just what it is. Human. Been some that has and most that hasn’t since dawn broke over Noah’s Ark. Now I’m heading back upstairs, you run along into the costumery here and see if you can get yourself a date for tonight. What you need is to have your ashes hauled, boy.”

  Furious, helpless, I scuttled to my office to begin work on an original and wait for Mossy’s triumphant summons on A Doll’s House.

  The morning was heating up in the throne room. Mossy began so calmly with his supervisors and flunkies they all thought it was going to be only a Monday morning preview of the week’s work. Perhaps one of them, the conniving production chief Seaton Hackley, suspected a storm was percolating beneath the calm. Others present, the lineup of fugitive grotesques it took to run a studio, were the deceptively genteel assistant production head Wren Harbuck; the hatchet man Dunster Clapp, who had fired the gentle Joey Jouet; suave overeducated nasal-accented British turncoat Percy Shumway; Curtt Weigerer, the chunky head production manager, his jaw hanging like a clothes iron, a side of beef with the demeanor of a storm trooper; Goddard Minghoff, Mossy’s amiable yet icy chief of staff; the yes-men Oddly Tumarkin and Dexter Twitchell; and Beeker Kyle, the villainous assistant studio manager who had been host to Jim Bicker when he first encountered Jubilee. These functionaries were a palace guard, variously capable of acting as modest ambassadors, jocular persuaders, or ruthless enforcers depending on what roles their maestro felt the situation required. When Seaton Hackley fired anyone his voice was like an oceanliner blowing a basso horn in a fog-shrouded harbor, while Wren Harbuck would steer someone off the lot sounding like an apologetic piccolo.

  “Fine weekend everyone?” Mossy asked as he casually leafed a script.

  “A little fun, a little work,” said Tumarkin. “Very little fun, whole lot of work,” said the suck-up Weigerer. It was Weigerer who kept the inventory on his office wall headed Rag Daze, a special calendar for charting the menstrual cycles of the important actresses on the lot; directors were warned not to make harsh demands, don’t have them swim if they don’t want to, during their periods. “As for me,” said the momentarily courageous Hackley, “enjoyed some time with the fam.” “Whilst I,” said Percy Shumway, betook myself to Arrowh—”

  “Good,” Mossy cut in, “and did anyone chance to hear from Bernard Gestikker?”

  “Bernard Gestikker?” said Wren Harbuck. “Who in the world … ?” “Gestikker?” said Dexter Twitchell. “Bernard?” said Oddly Tumarkin, whose first name Grszoddl no one, including he, ever used.

  “Oh sure, Chief,” said Hackley, “that’s Trent Amberlyn’s real name before you changed it.”

  “That’s nice, Shmuel, you win the quiz,” said Mossy to his head of production, who had been born Shmuel Himmelfarb not far from Mossy himself in the Bronx. Seaton Hackley knew a hurricane was about to hit when Mossy used his original name. “All right,” Mossy continued. “Let’s start over. Has anyone heard from Trent Amberlyn?”

  Head shaking all around. “Not me, Boss.” “Nor I.” “Saw him at your colossal splash Saturday night,” said Wren Harbuck, proud of his own little splash when he waltzed in from the garden with the starlet Hana Bliner. “Haven’t seen him since.” “Not a peep.” “Me either,” rounded out the chorus of yes-men saying, for a change, no.

  “How happy, how blessed, for all of you.” Mossy paused, then let the storm break. “Trent God Damn Amberlyn is in the Hollywood lockup!”


  “Whaaaaat?” Unbelief all around, insincere unbelief acted with as much flatulent insincerity as these bottom-feeders could muster.

  “Soliciting a minor,” Mossy went on. “Who was no doubt soliciting him and who Trent probably thought was eighteen or so but turned out to be only fifteen. A parking lot off Hollywood Boulevard on Las Palmas up near Franklin, cops happened to be patrolling it same time Trent was, ect ect ect, goddam treacherous little pansy ain’t dried shit without Jubilee, how could he do this to me!”

  This was not about Trent then. It was Mossy whose dignity was affronted. Mossy purposely used street grammar when he was upset, and ect was et cetera.

  Open season on Trent. Dunster Clapp and Curtt Weigerer set the tone when they both said “vicious little cocksucking queer” at the same time. The rest chimed in with their poofs, flounces, wrists, any slurs they could come up with to condemn Trent. “Someone that light in his loafers should know his way around,” said Goddard Minghoff, Mossy’s gatekeeper and the gentlest of his executioners. It was quipped around Jubilee that you had to go through God to get to Mossy; a producer wishing to gain favor at the studio tried to get God on his side first. In the present crisis, God added helpfully that he would look into the morals clause in Trent’s contract, shouldn’t be difficult to fire him.

  “I see,” said Mossy. “So you all agree it’s capital punishment for Trent?”

  “Any queer has it coming to him,” said the malevolent Curtt Weigerer, his face the blunt side of an ax. “Tar and feather the little fairy.”

  “Is that so, Curtt?” said Mossy. “And just what does Jubilee have coming? Trent Amberlyn has millions of fans and is worth more millions to this studio. You’re all so far off the point. The point is how dare not a single one of you know where our stars are?”

  “Boss, it was a weekend—”

  “Oh, that’s right, scandals don’t happen on weekends. Remember Fatty Arbuckle? Blockheads! I expect you to know where our talent is at all times. Now Trent is still down there when he should have been bailed within two hours of his arrest. He’s been there all night, and we can be sure someone from the Times, the Examiner or Variety will be at the jail within half an hour, maybe all three plus the Reporter. Weigerer, you have cop friends, Shmuel you know the detectives, get to them right away. And the rest of you—I don’t want any of you overpriced baboons ever not to know where our stars are. If somebody does land in a lockup, you get them out of there within an hour, half an hour. Always have cash ready for bail even on weekends, especially on weekends. Does any of you dopes not get this straight?”

  “We all get it, Boss,” said production chief Hackley, suddenly a spokesman for the chastened chamberlains. We let you down, and—”

  “It never happens again!” said Mossy. “You can all be replaced, replaceable parts if I say the word. “This never. Happens. Again!”

  “Never,” said the production chief, blinking, reduced almost to tears.

  “Never,” said Dunster Clapp.

  “But what do we do about Trent?” asked Beeker Kyle.

  “I wondered when anybody would ask,” said Mossy. Oliver Culp is on his way to bail him, and Esther Leah is going along to be the weeping aunt, Mrs. Gestikker.

  “But Oliver,” Seaton Hackley began, “Oliver is just a fairy himself.”

  “True, Seaton,” Mossy said, and Hackley was relieved his boss was back to using his social name. “But Oliver don’t pick up boys to split their ass that I know of, and that’s who Trent called, and Oliver called me.”

  Oliver Culp was the librarian at Jubilee.

  “Do you think this was a setup, Boss?” Curtt Weigerer asked, playing to the Zangwill paranoia that could surface at a critical moment. Jubilee was the newest of the majors, and sometimes the big studios played dirty tricks on each other. Mossy himself had used both Dunster Clapp and Curtt Weigerer to foster discontent at other studios among the craft unions starting up around Hollywood. Weigerer, a born enforcer, knew the notorious labor racketeer Willie Bioff from Capone days in Chicago. Bioff could make phone calls to start blue-collar trouble anywhere in the country. Weigerer himself, often called a fascist by free-spirited writers and actors, flourished in an atmosphere where fear and discipline were essential tools for controlling creative people whose habitual social state was anarchy.

  “What do you mean a setup?” Mossy asked.

  “I mean LB or Jack,” Weigerer said.

  Mossy was capable of suspecting rival studio chiefs of sabotaging his product. They could have a star like Amberlyn followed, knowing he was looking for other men, and they could tip the vice squad, always eager for headlines, when cruising was going on. The studio or the police themselves could easily plant a cute boy in a parking lot.

  “I don’t frankly think Jack Warner or LB Mayer would stoop that low.”

  Curtt Weigerer had worked for Harry Cohn at Columbia, had moved on for special assignments at Metro; he knew stooping. But he said, “Whatever you say, Boss.”

  “What I say is I want you bastards I pay obscenely high salaries to be on sentry duty with my stars, and I don’t want no actor or actress to be fifteen minutes in a lockup before one of you is on the case. Am I understood?”

  Mossy saw pleaders all morning as kings in earlier times received underlings and favor seekers. Their ambition, greed, cunning was overmatched by his own. Mossy’s system was simplicity itself. Loyalty was all he demanded, not agreement, only loyalty.

  His office was crafted to intimidate. At the end of a private corridor, the seat of power was huge, an emblem of his necessities—the need always to be a step ahead of his visitor, to have a story people wanted, to show money when that helped and to conceal it when crying for economy, most of all to express domination in every gesture and design. A reflecting pool on one side of the room was a grandiose distraction. As were Monet’s water lilies hanging above it. Strong men slumped in their seats, which was hard not to do because of the way Mossy had the chairs tilted backward on the supplicants’ side of his desk. An aggressive wash of light shone on whoever sat across from Mossy; the person was virtually Klieged by a ceiling spot and a light from below, both of which Mossy controlled from his desk. The desk itself was massive, often bare, platformed like Mussolini’s. When anyone objected to the harsh lighting, Mossy’s excuse was that he talked to a lot of aspiring actors and actresses; he needed to be able to see how they’d show up on film.

  But Mossy had another lighting idiosyncrasy. One side of his face was lit, while the other dipped into shadow. Disconcerting first-time visitors, Mossy became both sinister and cherubic because if he leaned one way the light on his head would tend to halate while his face looked like Beelzebub himself. This added to his mystery, and he often used the shadowy face when greeting a writer and again when firing him. One feature of Mossy’s turn in this darker direction was that, at thirty-four, as old and as young as the century, he was beginning to lose a small amount of his dark russet-tinged hair from the top of his head, and the halo would often be highlighting a tiny bald spot on his crown. With his little tonsure, Mossy could resemble a medieval monk gravely purposed to sentence a dozen suspected heretics to a session on the rack prior to their execution. Perhaps all he actually said was, “Manny, I’m afraid we’ve decided to go in another direction,” but the effect was as if he’d told Manny his testicles were to be snipped and fried in whale oil.

  In the long corridor leading to his office, one wall held photographs (some real, some composite fakes) of Mossy with stars and potentates, while the other was lined with a one-way mirror enabling Mossy to see into his waiting room—who was nervous, apprehensive, hopeful, annoyed. People had been known to cross themselves when the nod finally came from Elena Frye to proceed into the sovereign’s presence.

  At the very end of the corridor, just before the main chamber, you were flanked by two mirrors, a flat one opposite the one-way. If you looked in either of them you saw a great many frightened reflections of yourself. When Mossy dee
med you important enough to rise from his desk and come across the room to greet you, what he saw was what he loved, an infinity of Zangwills. The most treacherous mirror was behind Mossy’s desk, concealing a private door; actors were so inhibited by being made self-consciously aware of how they looked that they were disabled from conferring about anything more significant than a fresh wrinkle.

  Mossy himself was the best actor on his own lot. Dressed as fastidiously as a gangster, he could charm, berate, mother, father, rage as he did with his toughs-in-waiting over Trent Amberlyn, cajole, play the fool when he had nothing to lose, become a tragedian with everything to gain—all better than anyone he hired. He could withhold approval, vengefully suspend an actor for refusing a bad picture and then, when he heard the actor was about to sign with Paramount, offer him the role of his career opposite Joan Crawford or Palmyra Millevoix. “A superprecautious son of a bitch,” the labor racketeer Willie Bioff once described Mossy, “with a pair of mountains for balls.”

  His constitutional discontent seldom permitted Mossy, even on social occasions, not to be working. When I got to know her better I asked Esther Leah if Mossy ever slept. “And how,” she said. “You should see him, always on his back, with those long eyelashes at last closed, a smile on his face, as serene and guiltless as an angel.”

  “But with the heart of a devil,” I was cheeky enough to say.

  “Not really,” she said. “Just the brains of a devil, the heart of a hungry child.”

  “Who can never have enough.”

  “Who can never have enough.”

  After Elena had shooed the chastened executives who had not been alert to the Trent Amberlyn arrest, she led in a petitioner that Monday morning, Willow Blatchley, the old silents tycoon. A man given to apoplectic rages, Blatchley had a stroke that left him speechless. The stroke occurred in 1927 after he had taken his new wife, Renata, half his age and looking for fame and fortune herself, to a screening of The Jazz Singer at Warner Brothers. Blatchley went into a tirade against sound on film, clutched at his throat, flailed his arms, and fell down a flight of stairs, a scene he had filmed many times in his pictures. Mossy had been given his first job in Hollywood by Blatchley and had learned moviemaking at his feet. Literally. On one occasion, before a premiere, he had made Mossy shine his shoes. Errands and dirty work, often followed by harsh reprimands, were Mossy’s diet with the temperamental tycoon. Mossy had gone over to Metro in 1925, signaling, though neither of them knew it, his own sure rise and, even before sound, Willow Blatchley’s sunset. When he was told the circumstances of Blatchley’s stroke, Mossy had shrugged, “Melodrama is so old-fashioned.”