Girl of My Dreams

by Peter Davis

  One fan worked an entire year on a dollhouse for Pammy’s putative little sister. Some of the press guessed that Millie was Pammy’s daughter, but Stanny Poule had kept the fiction that Millie Millevoix was a sister. With the public becoming more suspicious, that was the story I’d changed the year before, the last time Mossy had ordered me into Publicity, by confecting the tale of a race car driver dying in his Bugatti at Le Mans, leaving his distraught widow and infant child.

  As innocent as he wanted Pammy in life, Mossy had still put her into an early Jezebel role, a scheming housewife, almost Bovary-like but living in Indiana. “SHE’S A TWELVE O’CLOCK WOMAN IN A NINE O’CLOCK TOWN,” the poster blared, and everyone went to the picture, which was called Fallen Grace. The poster showed Pammy’s negligee coming down off her shoulder, a scene not actually in the movie but carefully retouched into something risqué by the advertising department. This couldn’t have been done in the Code-run prudish world that 1934 ushered in, but it had been just the ticket in 1932.

  “All right,” Stanny Poule said to me. “Go see Blaine and Steerforth and write me quick cock-and-bulls of glory about the would-be somebodies so I can pitch blurbs to AP, UP, Reuters. “They’ll like you because you show interest in the humdrum lives of the proletariat before they come here to have us make monsters of them.”

  The department lush Mickey Siskind ambled over to me, his eyes not yet rheumy as they’d be in the late afternoon, though he hadn’t bothered to shave. “You can make Blaine and Steerforth into Pickford and Fairbanks,” he said, a little wobbly and with his sour breath sweetened by rum. I nodded unenthusiastically and began to move off. “No, listen.” He grabbed my tie. “A city built on fantasy is where everything is true, nothing is factual, see? Today’s hero is tomorrow’s figure of scorn. In Hollywood every worm turns. You’re crazy about someone or something? Wait and worry. They’ll collapse on you. Only thing you can do is put whatever you love or fear into a picture. At least you’ll have a record of that.”

  “Then you have some records of your own, Mickey,” I said to cheer him up.

  “The hell with you,” he said and shuffled off.

  When he was still sober part of the time, Mickey Siskind had been assigned the original publicity of how Palmyra Millevoix came to Jubilee. Mr. Zangwill, so the press release went, was in a story conference in 1931 trying to move a writer and producer off dead center on a script about a pair of doctors married to each other, treating malaria in the tropics where there was also a smuggler the wife becomes involved with. Seaton Hackley was in the room too. “But who will we get to play the woman?” Zangwill said, according to Mickey Siskind’s release. “I like that kid Bette Davis. She’s got spunk.”

  “Laemmle won’t let her go,” the producer said.

  “Crawford then.”

  “Same with Mayer.”

  “Stanwyck.”

  “After Ladies of Leisure, Columbia won’t let anyone else touch her.”

  “All right, geniuses,” said Zangwill, throwing up his arms, “now I know who I can’t get. Who can I get who will lift this part from notable to unforgettable?”

  The screenwriter spoke up. “Chief, you know who’s a little like Davis but sexier, something like Stanwyck but not so nasty, a little like Garbo but less foreign yet still Continental, tough like Kate Hepburn but smoother, sultry like Harlow but smarter?”

  “Stop being a press agent,” said Zangwill. “Who are you talking about?”

  “Palmyra Millevoix.”

  “Who? Change her name.”

  “Already been tried,” said the producer. “She won’t.”

  “What I’m saying,” the writer continued, “is she’s got everything those others have, only more because she’s got her own charge of electricity.”

  “Let me meet her,” said the studio chief. “Palmyra Millevoix.”

  When he saw her early rushes, Zangwill said it was beginning to look as though the screenwriter had a point.

  This was the gist of the press release the studio sent out when Pammy’s first Jubilee picture opened. Nowhere did Siskind mention that the screenwriter in the meeting was Yancey Ballard. Yeatsman didn’t mind. He said the planets exist only to make the sun brighter anyway, and his magnitude compared to Mossy’s was approximately that of Pluto.

  Stanny Poule’s phone rang. It was Mossy telling him about Trent Amberlyn’s arrest. Stanny took a couple of notes and said, “Huh, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.” Then he swung right into Mossy’s own Bronx patter. “Got it. It don’t happen till I say it happened, and when I say it happened it ain’t ever gonna happen again.” He changed his vocal pitch. “Mr. Amberlyn, who was doing research for a part in a picture, is shocked at the invasion of privacy but will decline to sue the Los Angeles Police Department on the grounds that these brave men risk their lives every day for the sake of the community … No? Okay, Mossy, I won’t put out anything at this point.”

  Ned Thoms picked up his phone and listened. It was Pammy. She had apparently decided to complain about the gruesome package we had opened at Red Woods. This was too hot for Ned and he handed the phone to Stanny. “That’s awful, dear, just awful,” Stanny said, “You can’t even count the freaks out there … You want me to do what? Forget about that, Pam, even if I’d issue such a press release asking the public to leave you and Millie alone Mr. Zangwill would kill it … No, you’re a very fortunate woman but you have to pay some costs. I’m surprised someone as smart as you thinks you can clamp down … No, you’re not entitled. Listen to me, Miss Millevoix, you’re a piece of property everyone likes to look at and you’re fricasseed chicken if you start to think otherwise.”

  On the way to the commissary I had to detour to deliver a publicity release to a big star on loan to Jubilee. I heard music from inside her trailer, which seemed to be moving a little, oddly rocking. When I knocked and heard no answer I decided she was in the shower, so I carefully let myself into the trailer to drop off the release for her approval. A curtain separated the entrance from the trailer’s main room. The record was piping a song from No No Nanette—“Tea for Two,” I think—and I could see on the other side of the curtain that someone was on top of the star, who was naked. When he turned his head to the side, I saw he was an equally big star. I can’t mention their names even today because of course they left the relationship, if it was that, out of their decorous autobiographies, and one of them has a prominent grandson who runs a studio. But what a fuck they were having. Olympian. The room was steamy, sweat flew from the little day-bed. Laughter, panting, shrieks. I didn’t want to hear; I heard. I didn’t want to peek; I peeked. Her nipples were the size of thimbles. I remembered someone in Publicity saying she had the boobs that launched a thousand quips. I turned away. At last she lay there, as he did, spent. I didn’t know what to do—leave the press release and run, sneak out with the pages and pretend I was never there, go out and knock again? The record was still playing loudly. I crouched like an idiot behind the curtain, an idiot whose career was about to end before it had gone anywhere. At length the man spoke. “Oh my lord,” he said, “but that was a good take.” “Uh huh,” the woman said, “one more time for the close-up.” As they began again and trumpets announced Helen Gallagher singing “Too Many Rings Around Rosie” from No, No Nanette, I stealthily slipped out the door and shoved the press release underneath. The trailer was rocking again.

  I ran to the commissary.

  The atmosphere there was jovial, a little compound of high-style cafeteria and grandstand where you stared at the Thoroughbreds. At a producers’ table the conversation veered to the pluck of one man who had a property all the others admired. “Yes,” the man said, “but I don’t know what to do with the heroine’s best friend because in the book she’s a lesbian.” “Oh, that’s no problem,” said one of the others. “In the picture just make her an Austrian.”

  Sitting next to me at the writers’ table, Yeatsman overheard this exchange and muttered to me, “Hearts will be broken
with solutions like that, and they won’t be the hearts of producers. It was easier out here when writers could just compose title cards like ‘She was cool in a crisis and warm in a taxi.’”

  As I was leaving the commissary I bumped into the actor and actress from the trailer. They entered laughing. No touching now, just a conspiratorial glance between them. I stood at the cash register paying for my lunch as the two stars paused to bask in the recognition they were receiving from the rest of the diners who mostly pretended not to notice them and raised their voices to prove it. The man had outfitted himself in a double breasted powder blue silk shantung jacket and ascot, checked slacks, and brown and white shoes. The woman was costumed in an ecru suit and matching little ecru felt beret, with a playful stem sticking up about as much as, twenty or so minutes earlier, her nipples had stood out from her chest. Carrying a doeskin purse with a gold clasp, she was all lady. Her shoes almost matched his, brown and white pumps. She said to him while they waited for the hostess to seat them, “For a fellow you have the best ass.”

  Colonel DeLight wanted a junior writer to test typewriters and make a selection among the Royals and Coronas and Underwoods so he could give all his charges new tools to work with. It was humiliating but since I’d just been fired off a script, which he obviously knew—“If you ain’t too busy, boy, I’d like to have your opinion on some typing machines over to the stationers”—I didn’t see I had any choice.

  As I drove off the lot the crowd of seekers was as large as ever. Extras were milling nervously. To get through the dispossessed throng I had to crawl slowly in my car. “I have an act George Jessel loved.” “Don’t they have anything for twins?” “I been building muscles down at the beach, I know I can do one of the Apeman’s pals.” Nobodies from Moline come west to make their last stand with their backs to the ocean. One of the scrawny kids ventured to my window, “Hey mister, are you somebody?”

  “No,” I said and sped away.

  13

  A Life in the Day

  Part II: Afternoon

  Answer: God remains on location.

  A little after two o’clock, Yeatsman sat in Mossy’s easy chair, deep leather with bronze studs, mulling what he was going to do with Madame Bovary. Mossy was not yet back from lunch with Brenda De Baule. When the studio head was out, his office was the quietest spot on the lot, far more private than Yeatsman’s own office in the teeming writers building among his harried colleagues always looking for advice or solace.

  As a familiar, perhaps the only familiar in Mossy’s employ, Yeatsman could use the space for contemplation that many others regarded as a potential torture chamber. In order for it to be transposed to film, any novel had to be stripped, flayed to its bones. Yeatsman wanted to leave out the Bovary background and begin in the convent.

  The young farm girl Emma, instead of having her world squelched by life in a nunnery, has her horizons broadened by reading. Millevoix was said not to have liked her own convent, Yeatsman thinks, but she’ll love this one, plus looking like a teenager again. Emma devours La Chanson de Roland, Ivanhoe, Joan of Arc. She is chastised, the books confiscated, all but the Bible, where she finds the perfect romance of Adam and Eve. The heroic Crusades and great love stories animate the young girl so much the Mother Superior has her removed from the convent. Back on the farm milking cows, caring for her invalid father, every chore dreary yet enlivened by Emma’s yearning: Yeatsman knew he had to show boredom without being boring.

  The young doctor, Charles Bovary, arrives. He cures Emma’s father and is a little on the earnest side—Brian Aherne?—but good looking and living in a town; he personifies salvation. The wedding is hurried, cheap, not what Emma planned, but at least she’s off the farm. Charles adores her; she finds him tedious, his affections bothersome. Tasting Champagne, and the high life, at an aristocrat’s provincial ball, Emma gets a whiff of what her life could be. Gossip surrounds her in the little town—we’ll skip the move to another town, Yeatsman suggests to himself, which adds little to her character—especially from the meddlesome druggist and his wife. The druggist, however, has potions Emma uses to escape her doldrums, as well as a young boarder who becomes infatuated with her. She resists the boarder and he runs away to study law, leaving her sick and regretful. Why didn’t she yield?

  Emma’s daughter is born, and the more the baby clings to her mother, the more Emma sends her off to a wet nurse. Charles is a proud father, Emma an unwilling mother. Now comes the suave, stylish Rodolphe—Adolphe Menjou, Yeatsman thought, possibly Charles Boyer—to have one of his servants cured by Charles. Emma takes up with him, is soon running out of the town at dawn for trysts at Rodolphe’s castle. The Code Nazis will hate this, Yeatsman knows, but we’ll make the wages of sin just what they want, as Flaubert did. Rodolphe is so elegant; Emma must live up to his luxury, and the druggist introduces her to a conniving merchant who is soon selling her clothes far beyond her husband’s means. And then furniture to fit out the home not of a provincial doctor’s wife but of a duchess. She and Rodolphe exchange passionate letters. Her smothering domestic life, made even worse by the townspeople’s gossip and intrusions, contrasts with the joyous transports of her affair with Rodolphe. Emma pleads with Rodolphe to take her away; we can tell even as he agrees that he’s planning his own escape.

  Rejected on the very night Rodolphe was to spirit her to Venice, Emma takes to her bed, sick with lost love, recoiling from her husband and daughter. She dresses her daughter in fancy clothes the Bovarys can’t afford, tells her romantic stories of the rich life in Paris—stories she is really telling herself—but avoids any real affection. Emma is plunging deeper into debt, and the conniving merchant is taking most of Charles Bovary’s income. Recovered from her illness, Emma goes to the larger town where the druggist’s former boarder is now a young lawyer. Gary Cooper? Yeatsman wonders; we don’t need another Frenchman. He becomes her lover, she brings him expensive presents, draining the last of her gullible husband’s money. More passionate letters between the lovers, read over Emma’s humdrum housewife existence. Charles is patient, naïve; he wants Emma to have anything she wants even if he is ruined.

  When the conniving merchant finally demands full payment of all Emma owes him, she has a tantrum. She returns humbly to the wealthy Rodolphe to beg for a loan. He refuses and when Emma has an even more violent tantrum—Millevoix will love this, Yeatsman thinks—Rodolphe has his servant throw her out. She runs through the rain across fields and stumbles several times. The music is building. Reaching the druggist’s house in the middle of the night, she searches for the key to his pharmacy, finds it, and in a fury of self-pity and self-hatred—Bernhardt would have been superb in a silent version of this, Yeatsman is thinking—she swallows several mouthfuls of arsenic.

  As Madame Bovary lies in bed, poisoned, her bewildered husband and weeping daughter plead with her to remain with them. A priest comes. Dissolve to a month later as the grieving Charles goes through Emma’s belongings. He finds the letters from her lovers. He collapses on the spot. In the final scene, Madame Bovary’s daughter is in the convent where her mother discovered her own yearnings, and she is reading Ivanhoe.

  “As much as a dollar for your thoughts,” Mossy said smiling wanly as he dragged his deboned wasted drained body into his office and, unable to stagger as far as his desk, plunged backward into his favorite chair as his favorite writer reluctantly vacated it.

  “‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams,’” Yeatsman quoted his master.

  So normally abnormally active, hopping with such agility from place to place and subject to subject, so filled with nervous energy that even his hands couldn’t stay still, Mossy was hard to envisage in his present enervated state. The image itself would not form. Yet Brenda De Baule had apparently left him, for once, slack. He could not even open a note Elena had handed him.

  Mossy’s exhaustion derived from lunching at the Brown Derby with Brenda De Baule, brought over from France, sort of, by way of Brooklyn to
become Jubilee’s answer to Greta Garbo. This was not a fixed destiny since, Mossy confided to Yeatsman, she was worth couching but not casting. Mossy’s eastern scouts had found Bogdana Deccabalu in the kickline at the Brooklyn Paramount, given her half a day to say goodbye to her family in Flatbush—she hated her milkman father for abusing her in the predawn before his delivery route, hated her mother for letting this occur, promised to send for one younger sister before the same thing happened to her—and shipped her to Paris for six months. In Paris Jubilee’s representative arranged for her to have French lessons and, more importantly, French accent lessons, while he went about officially changing her name and acquiring a French passport for her. Jubilee then re-immigrated her to the United States and had photographers and columnists waiting on the West Thirty-ninth Street pier when she voyaged in on the Île de France. She was a Continental starlet.

  The only trouble was the former Bogdana Deccabalu could not act. She couldn’t even act Brenda De Baule. Her French accent had too little Left Bank, too much Sheepshead Bay. She was, however, adept at Mossy’s luncheon plans, and then some. Fatigued from his postprandial labors, the poor man had to give a rude précis before proceeding to something he wanted to ask from Yeatsman. The drawback of using the studio head’s office for study and reflection was he made himself handy for favors.

  “Mouth like a Hoover,” Mossy said as he free-associated and gradually regained strength. “The woman could suck a basketball through a straw, dancer’s ass twisting on you, she pants like a starved dog I find it adds to the whole event don’t you, Packard’s getting messy though, listen I got a miserable third act on Escapade in Acapulco out of Benges and Spighorr who must be drunk all day, you did the treatment, fix it by Friday so we can shoot Monday I’ll let you have anything you want next, I need less talktalk, more on the jewel robbery and castanet girls, put in a fatal accident at the mine, coupla three yuks then the kid winds up with the other guy’s girl like I told Spighorr who paid no attention, which was what everybody in the seats wants and we all go home happy, New York included, once more with Brenda De Baule I’m turning her over to Dunster Clapp if you don’t exercise your option, any skirt on this lot is yours if I get my script Friday.”