Girl of My Dreams

by Peter Davis

  I decided to maintain my optimism with a breezy “Hi Chief,” and a cheerful “Glad to see you, Percy, Jack,” trying to look confident and ready for my Doll’s House praise. I’d thought I might even get to be assistant producer on the picture. At Mossy’s first words, my young face must have exhibited the look you have when your elbow has accidentally hit hard against a piece of metal or concrete and before the full pain has shot through your arm but you know it’s on its way.

  “Don’t trust your instincts.” That was what I heard first, or thought I did, but I later decided that what Mossy may have said was, “You don’t trust your instincts, only approval.” And then he said, “So trust mine.” He didn’t say whether he meant his instincts or his approval, but they amounted to the same thing.

  “You’re off A Doll’s House,” he said next.

  “But how … everyone said I did a fine … I don’t understand.” Mossy’s words so bewildered me I had no idea where to go.

  “To begin with, I hate the new title,” he said. “She’s a Doll. It disgusts me.”

  “Title is Lidowitz,” I tattled, not daring to call him Littlewits.

  “I don’t load my mind with details,” Mossy said. “The story has lost its bite, meanders toward a hopefulness that hasn’t earned its keep.”

  “I thought you wanted an up-ending. Why did Seaton Hackley praise—?

  “It’s not just the ending. Look, I make pictures with intelligence and taste, but it don’t hurt if there’s a booby or two in them. Nora’s got negative sex appeal here.”

  “Our GBS did all this so much more strikingly well,” Percy Shumway butted in to support his boss, “if what one wants is sort of Woman Independent, you know.”

  “I’m afraid,” said Jack Grader, a mannerly hangman, “that what we have is a fifth-rate husband when what we need is solid third- or perhaps even second-rate.”

  Shumway enlightened me further. “Now don’t you see what Shaw gave us in Man and Superman was an absolutely spot-on Life Force in Ann Whitefield, while Jack Tanner essentially doesn’t know what hit him.”

  “Nora’s quandary seems second-rate, Owen,” said Grader, piling on after the whistle had blown. “We need a first-rate dilemma to get a top-rank actress opposite a Torvald, or Tom as we call him, who’s worthy of both her affection and desertion.”

  “You have contempt for Lidowitz, you think he’s a subnormal,” said Mossy and I winced. How could he tell? I thought Lidowitz a fumbling imbecile. “I want Lidowitz supervising the picture so I’m putting Gravier and Stallworth on the script.”

  Hacks! I didn’t dare say because I wanted a job and because, after all, what was I in training to become myself? Hacks! (I didn’t dare repeat.) Who can barely spell their goddamn names much less write a drama much less lick Ibsen’s boots. “Good luck to the Bobs,” I finally said weakly, since my replacements had one first name between them. (Question: since Gravier and Stallworth quickly turned the screenplay into a comedy, The Doll Gets the House, who did Ibsen hate most as he writhed in his grave—Gravier and Stallworth because they guillotined A Doll’s House, or me because I had it rolling on the tumbrels?) I was crushed, and I guess it showed on my face.

  “Now never mind this, young fellow,” said Mossy, who had never called me that before. “This is nothing in the long run.”

  “I eat in the short run,” I said, drowning in self-pity.

  “Oh for Christ’s sake, Owen, I’m not canning you off the lot, just off the picture. My audience in Squirtville’s gotta love my pictures, and they’re not gonna love this one the way you outlined it, that’s all. I have something else for you, much bigger, I’ll tell you about it later. For now, get over to publicity. Stanny needs help.”

  As I was leaving, sentenced to menial press agentry, my last glimpse of my firing squad a mezzotint of their death masks, Elena came in with an elegant bouquet that she carried like a baby. “Here they are, Mr. Z,” she said with more formality than I’d ever heard her use. “Fit for a king, or at least a prince. Empress Joséphine roses.” She placed the aristocrats on Mossy’s desk.

  Hitting the company street, I imagined my life unhappening, unspooling backward in the projector all the way to my mother, trying to find where, had I turned in the other direction, this disaster wouldn’t have happened. My audience in Squirtville? An audience he had decided he owned and I couldn’t reach. Stung badly, I wondered what might have become of me if Mossy had loved my treatment. But he hadn’t; I was the subnormal now, not Littlewits, who was only playing the game he’d been taught.

  If Gable saw me now, just minutes since we’d passed on the lot before my garroting by Mossy and his accomplices, would he already know to ignore me, intuiting through the ether that I was no longer the fair-haired boy but back to being the office boy? I’d lost altitude so fast I was without hope of the fame or glamour, granted that screenwriters shared only derivatively in these, that sustained the town. Cheerless, I mused.

  “Don’t meddle with Mossy on a bad day,” Yeatsman was fond of saying, “because he’ll make yours worse.” He made me feel I’d let him, the studio, the entire cinesphere, down. The contradiction was he could be gentle, though when he was I always suspected a purpose. On the rare occasions when he was in a true panic—a picture was going down the chute to oblivion, an actor he needed was stolen by Mayer or Harry Cohn, New York was advancing on him like Birnam Wood to Dunsinane—I found him nimble. He called New York Bigtime when it loved him, Ostrichtown when it didn’t.

  The essence of Mossy and the other studio heads was they were able to put their ideas into forms as communicable as diseases. Once the audience caught the illness—sex, crime, romance, comedy, ridiculing the rich, sinners seeking redemption—there was no cure. No cow would ever be sacred anymore. In the Hollywood mirror every image cracked, every precept taught by the schoolmaster and the parson was twisted into a laugh, a pant or a scream. The actors and their environment generally sold beauty and perfection. When the audience left the theater, Poor Jim Bicker lectured me, they’d have surface satisfaction but deeper discontent. From the discontent, according to Bicker, would grow and spring and march a country so aggressive that nothing short of planetary dominion could satisfy its masses.

  As for what animated Mossy and the other bosses, they were suing for damages. Most of the early tycoons had cruel, unsuccessful, weak fathers. In the Zangwill family, the tyrannical yet irresponsible father ran off when Mossy was eleven. They never heard from him. Mossy blamed his father but also hungered after him, finding his mother a negligible person who was both pathetic and deserving of her abandonment.

  Craving salvation through power, Mossy created an institution in which everyone else was stacked, ascending blocks in a pyramid, to support the great stone at the top. In this structure it was not uncommon for a writer’s ideas to strike Mossy as his own. That was what I’d been vainly hoping for myself in A Doll’s House; he’d like my take on the classic so much he’d think it was his own. Fundamentally, our ideas were his not only in the sense that he owned what was done at his studio but also in the more psychologically compromised sense that writers spent their time and brain muscle in attempts to mimic his taste and sensibility, to become Mossy himself, internalizing him in order to sell him their version of a picture they hoped he wanted made. The effect this had on a writer was that he was invited to negate his identity, a recipe for developing terminal contempt for oneself. A few resisted. Yeatsman would fight with Mossy; weaker souls plunged into despair for hanging on to a salary they had become addicted to.

  As though they existed in a pre-Copernican universe that revolved around them, Hollywood executives turned distortions into new realities. Mossy once asked Yeatsman and Tutor Beedleman for a suspenseful thriller that was also a goofball comedy with heartless villains. Miraculously, they complied. This became The Producer’s Party, about Hollywood itself, and the portrait of executives made all the studio heads in town squirm until they heard the audience roaring. They kne
w they were being wickedly ridiculed, but it was happening entertainingly, profitably, and since they were all such narcissists anyway they were happy to see the reflection of themselves no matter how absurd, even loathsome. Ridiculous men the lot of them, but they knew what they wanted.

  While I, demonstrably, did not. Slouching toward exile in publicity, I wandered the lot miserably. Somewhere two roads had diverged, and I’d taken the wrong fork.

  With admirable timing, Frederic March strolled by me in the company street, chatting amiably with the writer Edwin Justis Mayer, another of the rare breed who would stand up to Mossy. Not a wave or nod from either one of them. Had Mossy sent telegrams to everyone on the lot to ignore me? It was in the air: I was a nobody again.

  12

  Purgatory

  “Fairy tales, that’s the business I’m in,” said Stanny Poule, head of the department, when I reported to Publicity. He was middle-aged, grew a brush mustache, and with his green eyeshade and black cord above the elbow on his striped shirt, he could have been an editor on any big-city daily. He liked to remind newcomers, and himself, he’d had a life prior to Jubilee. “I was an honest reporter once, St. Louis, and now I’ve graduated to being Hans Christian Andersen. If I see a star who isn’t leading a storybook life, I give him one, or make her sound like a novitiate in a convent when in reality—which we don’t like around here—she’s just had an abortion.”

  The Publicity Department was a long low-slung building conveniently next to the commissary, which made it easy for press agents to take stars to lunch with outside reporters as a way of keeping the reporters off the sets, where they might see something unpleasant. The department was run like a newspaper, with its own reporters, copy editors, and a virtual city room. But it was also not like a newspaper because the only job of anyone there was to put the best face on everything and to tell no truth unless it happened to produce higher wattage for a given star or the studio itself.

  “What I need you to do, Owen,” Stanny Poule told me, “is to write me quick bios of Amy Blaine and Billy Steerforth. I got no one to put on this so I asked the boss for help, hope you don’t mind.”

  Of course, I did mind a lot, but it wasn’t Stanny’s fault. Blaine and Steerforth were young contract actors Mossy hoped would become first leads. They were both pretty boring, and I thought maybe I could confect a romance.

  Those who worked in Publicity tended to know a good deal of studio dirt, star dirt (as opposed to the more sanguine star dust), because they were so often called on to hide the truth and had to know what they were disguising. Stargazers themselves, they tried to remain intimates of the stars, which they could do so long as they knew their place as satellites. In the case of Blaine and Steerforth, they were so ordinary there wasn’t even dirt on them.

  Another publicist, Ned Thoms, a gentle idealist on the tortuous path to becoming a moody cynic, came in with a problem. Ned was the eleventh in a family of eleven, taught from an early age that his own life was of no interest to anyone, so it came naturally to him to publicize the lives of others. “Hugh Astor wants to quit,” he said.

  Astor was no star but a reliable leading man with his own fan club. He’d been a North Dakota boy whose name was changed from Borko Lukenbrot. He’d never been comfortable with his new identity. “What picture does he want out of?” I asked.

  “No, I mean walk off the lot, out of the industry,” Ned said. “Go back home.”

  Hugh Astor was running into the wall many actors hit. What hurt them most was the impersonalization of their personalities. For those who had thought they might have stage careers, the parts they were asked to play in pictures seemed silly to them. Instead of walking through these roles, adding just the right eyebrow arch here and smirk there, they began to overact, to trust neither the camera nor the director. In such cases the camera became their stalker instead of their partner. Very occasionally one would say Goodbye Hollywood, I’m gone. And actually become Borko Lukenbrot again.

  Most stuck around town complaining. “What Jubilee wants me to do is not what I became an actor to do,” they’d say. One day an actor would realize it had been months since he was offered a picture, a year and a half since his last choice role, and he saw they were no longer tailoring material to his strengths. Publicity was still sending over fan letters, getting his name into columns, having him cut ribbons at supermarket openings. He’d wind up his ego and go see Mossy. If Mossy wanted the actor he would plead, even go down on one knee (he hadn’t an ounce of pride if he wanted someone) as if he were proposing, which in a way he was. If he didn’t want you he’d say, “Gee we’re going to miss you” when what you’d counted on was, “I can’t live without you.” After that an actor couldn’t get an appointment with Ned Thoms, much less Stanny Poule.

  “Get a delegation from Astor’s fan club to come tell him how much they need him,” Stanny told Ned. “They plead with him to stay in pictures. That should do it.”

  Mossy kept an occasional derelict in Publicity like Mickey Siskind, who had written title cards for silent movies and was a charming raconteur until he was too drunk. Mickey had once saved Mossy from being fired for going overbudget at a Poverty Row studio by writing an amusing short that made use of Mossy’s outtakes in another picture. After Mickey began conversations with reporters by calling promiscuous leading ladies sluts and their male counterparts whoremongers, Stanny wanted to fire him. He knew Mossy wouldn’t allow it, so he reduced the old screenwriter to a planter. Planters would call up select reporters and columnists and try to get them to print mere items, not even stories. Columnists remembered when he had been the high-priced Mickey Siskind ten years earlier and would often print the squib for old time’s sake. Things like it’s William Powell’s anniversary and his wife wants everyone to know their union is stronger than ever. This after he’d been seen three nights in a row at the Cocoanut Grove with Jean Harlow. Mickey could still do that pretty well in 1934.

  If a subtler plant were called for, Stanny would do it himself. He called Louella, for instance, when Jubilee wanted to discipline Pammy for trying to have Mind Your Own Business rewritten after shooting had begun. This led to a blind-item warning in the Parsons column that a certain female star was getting too big for her bodice at Jubilee and had best mind her p’s and q’s or else she could find herself back in Hitlerland. A cunning reminder that Pammy might have a checkered past available for exploitation by an unfriendly columnist. In this case it didn’t work, and Mossy ordered a rewrite when Pammy threatened to call Louella herself and invite her to the Mind Your Own Business set, which was in complete disarray with a first-time director from the New York theater.

  The powerful columnists, especially Louella and Hedda Hopper, were regarded with a mixture of shrewdness, fear, and hate; like the gods, they had to be propitiated. The columnists, as representatives of the public, fawned on the idols, and then hacked away at their feet to find out if they were clay—and if the feet were flesh, this naturally hurt. They always blamed their readers when talking to the stars: I hate to ask you this, Hedda would say, but your millions of fans are dying to know—are you leaving your husband/wife? Is it true you’ve been seeing Tracy/Stanwyck? Did you check into that desert clinic for a touchy operation/drying out/nervous breakdown? The stars were allowed to be beautiful and rich as long as they said they wished they could lead lives just like the miserable rest of us, thereby mollifying their fans’ jealousy and eerie rage.

  The cooperative stars were all seen to be leading their fairy tale lives, courtesy of Publicity, even in the face of tragedy. When Loretta Young’s aunt lost the baby Loretta wanted for her own she was so brave she took a day off to fly east for the funeral even though she herself was deathly afraid of airplanes. Thus spake Hedda Hopper. Babies die, favorite uncles are killed by trains, parents separate, if nothing else is going on a beloved schnauzer goes off to the kennel in the sky, while the star remains steadfast.

  In a publicity gimmick, Mossy was photographed handing the
keys to a new Cadillac to Venetia Stackpole as the starlet’s birthday present from her generous studio. It was Stanny Poule, asserting the Adamic prerogative that Mossy occasionally yielded, who came up with the starlet’s name, which had originally been Bronislawa Klenkowski. “Your new name preserves your family’s roots,” Stanny told her without explanation. As soon as the press had its story, a studio guard whisked the Cadillac away from Venetia. Since the studio had paid both for Venetia’s abortion and for a genuinely for-keeps car to give the gas station attendant who had caused the pregnancy (only a Pontiac though), Venetia felt she was in handcuffs. She complained to Mossy when Stanny had her anointed Miss Dam Site and arranged for her to open the sluice gates at an Oregon waterway.

  “Here’s what we do around here, Miss Stackpole,” Mossy told her. “We make a Who? into a Wow! Any complaints?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then don’t let me hear any beefs about how we do it. Now get.” Mossy treated the Polish girl the way Germans treated Poles in those days.

  “So the whole thing is a business of falseness?” Venetia asked the considerably more studio-wise Pammy.

  “And of truth,” Pammy replied, “sometimes definitely a business of truth.”

  The publicity for a new star was so blatant that at first everyone laughed about it, including the rising star. After that the star became aw-shucks modest, but he saw how the public adored him and began to think there might be something to it. Next he saw people at the studio and around town in awe of him, and finally he became so impossible no one could approach him without praise. Or her. Worse, the publicity departments, which had started the whole ball rolling, ended by believing their own words. Mossy made a specialty of knowing how to deal with stars, but even he admitted the publicity apparatus reminded him of Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory. “The story of the stars,” he said, “is one third soap opera, one third Greek tragedy, and one third madcap comedy.”