by Peter Davis
“You know, Mossy, you give responsible infidelity a bad name. You’re a setback for all us occasionals.”
“I got to have these other jobs, my wife doesn’t understand my needs.” When he said “my wife” instead of “Esther Leah,” Mossy was always a little ashamed.
“I’ll warrant,” said Yeatsman affecting Edwardian propriety, “that precisely what Esther Leah does understand are your needs. Only too well.”
“Friday then on the script so I can tell my director what I want on Saturday and he can shoot it Monday.”
“Just a goddam minute, will you, or as my bard put it, ‘The stallion Eternity Mounted the mare of Time, ’Gat the foal of the world.’”
“So he must have, Yeatsman, and that mare says we have a script Friday.”
“Don’t expect too much here, Mossy. Death and sex and money are all any sane audience has a right to.”
“Even in Mexico, no horses for the chase. I don’t want no Western.”
Mossy ordered Chinese tea as a restorative and cancelled his afternoon fellatio as well as his shoeshine. No calls, he told Elena. He stayed by himself and, with rare quiet descending on him, gave consideration to what he needed to do. Idly, he opened the note he had been holding since Elena handed it to him. “Tell this to Orville,” Pammy had scribbled, “maybe he’ll bend a little. Imagination is not real, Mr. Wright, yet surely its fruits are. The romance of flying was possibly all you needed, but the audience needs the other kind too. Let us celebrate you with both kinds.” Underneath that she wrote:
The brothers Wright
Thought about flight,
Thought about it day and night;
Dreamin’, buildin’, cogitatin’
In the garage they had in Dayton.
They had nothing but an image;
This wasn’t the game, just a scrimmage—
Until they saw the contraption working
The brothers stayed at it, never shirking.
Neighbors came to gape and gawk:
Next thing you knew was Kitty Hawk.
Mossy stared at the note for a moment. Hmp, maybe after all, he said to himself.
He returned to his own plight. All his work was merely a way of going down into the town and seeking forgiveness—forgiveness for sin original only in that it belonged to him alone and he both valued and apprehended its persistence. On Sunday mornings as a boy he would head out to the open spaces of the Grand Concourse holding his mother’s hand. They would survey the wider world. On their way to Mossy’s grandmother, which was the only reason his mother would have him wearing a yarmulke, they looked at all creation. “Things you don’t know about yet,” she often said to him, “those things you can see here, a bigger map for you, Mossy darling, that has Italians, Irish, Armenians, Germans, Poles, the Coloreds in it, Chinese too, with problems like we got and some of their own. A world you’ll live in one day when you finish with your old bubbe, sweet as she is, and your schnorrer of a papa, unbearable as he can be. Me, too, Mossala, though I hope wherever you land you’ll send for your tender loving Ma, eh?”
Mossy regarded her in a quizzical manner that suggested he would not be sending for anybody, especially not anybody who leaned on her perception of herself as helpless. “But you may, Amos,” she added, reading his determined little eight-year-old squint. “You don’t know yet what you’ll do when you get out there, but whatever it is, you’re going.” She was not giving her son a philosophy, only a direction, and the direction was: out-of-the-Bronx. Horace Greeley couldn’t have put it better.
His goddamned father. The brutal rage of the unprovoked tyrant who knows he’s weak. Mossy’s father inherited a small hat business and ran it straight into the ground and forever after blamed all those near him, blamed his smart son and his dumb one, his daughter, his wife and her sister and their mother, blamed the Slovak super downstairs, blamed the plumber, the butcher, even the teacher at Mossy’s school when she said the ingredients in America’s melting pot didn’t all melt. That was Moe Zangwill, hot and cold at the same time, boiling and frozen. Short and squat, muscled with anger, raging around the apartment in undershirt and suspenders, topping himself with one of the derbies he couldn’t sell.
If life in these circumstances taught Mossy any lesson it was that humankind is only walking distance from Hell. People eventually will burn up. All that will be left, he was sure, will be pictures and words, musical notes for sounds the earth won’t even remember. What he had known as a boy and carried with him at Jubilee was the simple notion that he should expand the walking distance as far as he could and let Hell take care of itself.
When he was alone Mossy did not dream movies; he dreamed moviemakers. If one of his dreams floated by in the form of a star, a director, a writer, sometimes a composer, Mossy would yell to himself, That’s It! The logjam was broken and soon there would be a theme, script, cast, production. The old man, as he was called by employees twice his age, put together the collection of gifts he wanted in order to make a love story, a comedy, a drama, an adventure, a spectacle.
In a story conference he paid less attention to the details of the story than to the storyteller. If he believed the teller he believed the tale. He’d help you pick up the thread of a story if you lost it. What he wanted was your desire. While his assistants were already smirking at your stumbles, he’d be steering you back onto your own track. A slicko storyteller didn’t necessarily get Mossy’s green lights. Someone he believed got them. And for a generation, America believed Mossy.
Which didn’t mean he was not a son of a bitch, double crosser, diabolical seducer, and all the rest of the constellation of vice. It only meant he had an accurate stethoscope. When he heard murmurs of the heart, he responded to them.
Carelessly, unknowingly, Mossy had played a leading role in the stuntman Joey Jouet’s motorcycle plunge off the Santa Monica Pier into the Pacific. Joey’s wife, the set designer Elise Millevoix Jouet, was at home in a duet with Mossy that Sunday. She had dark hair over willing features centered around her button nose that was not as prominent as her sister’s yet capable of making its own little statements. When the nostrils distended slightly the man looking at her could assume she found him attractive. Finding Mossy attractive had been easy. Part of his charm was power, part was his being a distillation of want, but the compelling part was that Elise felt Joey’s career remained completely safe in this time of cutbacks if she were sleeping with the head of their studio. She was so discreet even Pammy had no suspicion. Joey died of a misunderstanding.
Elise, who knew nothing about Joey’s having been fired by Jubilee the day before, found herself wondering, as her visitor rose and fell on top of her, how Mossy rejected people. On this day, this unexceptional Sunday of Mossy’s first—and as it turned out only—call at the Jouet home, the two little girls were with their cousin Millie at Red Woods while Joey, as far as Elise knew, was off doing his stunts in Victorville. She hoped her playful daughters weren’t exhausting their Aunt Pammy.
Mossy ground his way toward the inevitable. Until he began his charge he was warmly attentive to Elise’s desires, but then, abruptly he was only about himself, turning the act into a collision of flesh. She heard a propeller overhead, a Sunday pilot out for a spin. Did Mossy execute people himself or did someone else draw and quarter the victim? Elise’s reverie was interrupted by a closer sound, something downstairs. Just the Persian. If Mossy were a racehorse, he was charging down the homestretch. No, a cat wouldn’t close a door. Pammy brought the children home early! One of them must have been naughty or become sick. But no, it wasn’t that either. Elise heard a tread heavier than Pammy’s. Oh Christ! But Joey was safely in Victorville on location. Wasn’t he? Must be a delivery, sometimes they were made on Sunday. A sound by a window.
The Jouet home, a modest two-story Spanish tiled stucco, was perched on one of the cluttered Santa Monica streets just off Wilshire, well back from the pricier ocean villas. Downstairs, Joey looked out the window and saw Mossy Za
ngwill’s Packard touring car on the street. Why hadn’t he noticed it as he coasted his motorcycle into the driveway? He had so much on his mind. He put his hand on the banister. Hearing a sound of coupled pleasure upstairs, he took his hand away. Well, he was a stuntman, he knew how to take a fall.
Nom de dieu, what could Elise say if the intruder was Joey? What should she whisper to Mossy right now? What was there to say to anyone? How could she ever make this up to Joey, sweet Joey, a dreamy husband who wouldn’t hurt a termite if it was eating down the house. Mossy, damn him, was at the finish line. Elise heard the side door open softly while Mossy concluded noisily, his face almost battering her into the headboard. Hoping it wasn’t Joey, wondering desperately how to make Joey understand, how to use Mossy to Joey’s advantage without Joey’s knowing it, Elise heard the door click shut. No slam, still soft. It was the last sound she ever heard her husband make.
She didn’t know when she could call Joey or for that matter where. Maybe it wasn’t Joey. Would he go to Pammy and confide in his sister-in-law, who adored him? Pammy would be indignant, even horrified, on Joey’s behalf. But later, on Elise’s behalf, the incident would be safely, Europeanly, ignored.
Wheeling his motorcycle out of the driveway, Joey knew where to go, and where to go first. He headed up toward Chautauqua for the view. Then he would fly.
Mossy tunneled darkly in his leather chair. He felt a pang and didn’t know where it came from. That had been a good job at lunchtime but no one to put into Escapade in Acapulco. The part was too small for Teresa Blackburn, but Spitz Toogan said Maria Trilby would be right for it. A slim blonde with a chin a cameraman could do interesting work with. Get her. Hire Cyrus Henscher to score it. Though he heard rumors Henscher was bad with women, all Mossy wanted was a sprightly Mexican score. Henscher would be the ticket. But something was wrong.
Elena buzzed. She was sorry, knew he wasn’t to be disturbed, but Arthur Brisbane was on the line from New York, the third time he had called in twenty minutes. Brisbane was a premier columnist for Hearst and at times ran down a rumor for the press lord. “All right, what can I do for you, Arthur?”
“One of our boys at the Examiner out there says Trent Amberlyn is in the pansy pen downtown. The chief wants to know if we go with this.”
Mossy bought time with a laugh. Evidently he did not have every single cop paid off because the Los Angeles Examiner, may it burn in Hell, now wanted to print Amberlyn’s—and therefore Jubilee’s—mortification. Hearst hated the way Palmyra Millevoix was being described as a bigger star than Marion Davies had ever been, and he’d love to stick it to Mossy, or at least withhold sticking it in such a way that Mossy owed him a huge favor. “Why, I have no idea what you’re talking about, Arthur, or Mr. Hearst either,” Mossy said. “Amberlyn is on his way in from location out in the Valley and should be back on Stage Seven by five o’clock or so. Shall I have him call you?”
Five o’clock being eight in New York, well past the time Brisbane wanted to wait in his office. Columnists loved to exercise their sadism, expose the clay feet that would appeal to Bible Belt morality and everyone else’s voyeurism, but they were lazy. Mossy treated the press with diplomatic disdain.
“That won’t be necessary,” Brisbane said. “Our tips aren’t always airtight. The chief sends his regards. Good luck handling the new Puritan movie Code.”
Mossy wondered briefly why Hearst hadn’t had Louella Parsons make the call since this was her territory and it was probably she who had the tipster downtown. But Brisbane was closer to the throne. Hearst might suppose Brisbane scared Mossy more than Parsons because a call from him meant the rumor had already spanned the continent.
The coming of the Code. Mossy considered what the new Motion Picture Code would do to his business. The Code was intended to soothe wary investors and stave off the Protestant Bible Belt and their Catholic counterparts, who wanted actual censorship of movies. A Catholic bishop had issued an edict that no picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Among images banned from the screen were depictions of what was called sex perversion, illegal drug traffic, white slavery (though not black), miscegenation, sex hygiene, indecent or undue exposure, excessive kissing, lustful embraces, suggestive postures and gestures, and even surgical operations. As he thought about all this, Mossy, who hadn’t patterned his movies after his personal life but pretended to pattern his personal life after the movies, shuddered. He couldn’t live the Code, and the Code could ruin him. Already, Mossy was witnessing the occasional mysterious disappearance of his erections.
Who stole my boners? Mossy wondered. And his simple answer was the goddamned Code. The Motion Picture Code stole his hard-ons and gave them to priests in Chicago and Boston, who aren’t even supposed to have them. And to evangelists in Memphis and Dallas. He had two producers he suspected of being currently impotent since he was paying their mistresses to give him performance reports. The strange case of the missing hard-ons. It might be contagious. They could make a picture about this in defiance of the goddamn Code. Brenda De Baule, firebrand that she was, had cured the problem for the time being, but you never knew when it might crop up again. He’d better keep her around for a while.
Elena buzzed him that two writers, a director, and a producer had been waiting half an hour. Mossy fairly dreamed through their story conference. “Tell me what you want to do,” he began.
“-----------------,” the producer declared.
“-----------------------------------,” one of the writers agreed.
The other writer demurred. “------------------------------------------?” he asked.
“---------------------------------------!” the director emphasized, and the producer was with him. “---------------------,” he said, and repeated himself. “---------------------.”
The second writer still wasn’t sure. “-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------,” he worried.
The first writer was reassuring. “---------------------------------------,” he said, not wanting to discuss this now and trying with a hand signal to indicate to his collaborator they would solve that problem on their own, in private.
Mossy’s hands got busy. He gesticulated. “-------------------!” he said, meaning they shouldn’t bother him again until they knew.
“-----------------------------------------------------------,” the producer explained levelly, furious at the second writer for expressing his doubts publicly.
Now the director wasn’t satisfied. “--------------------------------------?” he asked.
That was not for him to worry about. “--------------------------------------,” Mossy said impatiently, silencing the director.
The producer began to sum up. “---------------------- … ”
Mossy said, “Don’t insult us by telling us what we already know. Meeting over.”
Alone again, the studio head began to dive into a state of extreme anxiety. He worried about the whole schedule of Jubilee Pictures. What was in production was too light and insubstantial, what was planned too larded and solemn.
Who should intrude upon our Mossy in this solitary state but the Prince of Wales? That was what the Empress Joséphine roses were about that Elena had brought in while I was being evicted from A Doll’s House. The Prince had spent time in America ten years earlier, enjoying himself especially in California, and he was eager to feel free again, which he could never do while on duty in his own country or the Empire. No one outside his immediate retinue, including his family, yet knew about the twice-divorced American, Mrs. Wallis Warfield Simpson, whom the Prince had met several years before and who, several years later, would cost him the throne he had waited for so patiently. With his retainers in the outer office, Edward P., as he was referred to behind his back, strode loftily into Mossy’s office with a single companion, the English lickspittle Percy Shumway, who had so adroitly aided in my execution that morning.
“In the flesh, Your Highness,” Mossy said, forgetting the Royal. “I knew they had many charms, but your description makes me wish you were writing screenplays here. I do raise orchids as well, since you mentioned them.”
“But they’re parasites,” the Prince shot back. “Orchids are often parasitic.”
“Not the species I cultivate,” Mossy said. “I favor ones that originate in Hawaii and are pollinated by butterflies, the Phalaenopsis semi-alba.”
In the manner of earlier Hollywood executives sporting ostentatious cars and later production chiefs obsessing over art, Mossy had his gorgeous flowers. Rembrandt and Van Gogh were mandatory for a studio head, and Mossy dutifully hung them, but it was his garden that most enticed and reflected him. He loved the seedlings and buds and mature flowers, he learned the stamens and pistils and stigmas and pollinia. He even cherished the dying plants completing their cycle, dropping seeds to carry on their line. The Empress Joséphines remained the most honest organic matter in the room, their long-stemmed delicacy present to deflect Mossy’s origins and the Prince’s well-known aversion to Jews, as if no Jew could have a flower so absurdly upper class on his desk, named for Napoleon’s wife, a gentile production if ever there was one.