Girl of My Dreams

by Peter Davis

  “I do what I do because that’s what I do when I do it,” Mossy said. Turning to Curtt Weigerer, he added, “Go find that fifteen-year-old kid. Give him a present, ten thousand dollars cash, and tell him and his parents they should make themselves a new start with your gift. Also tell them that it wasn’t Trent Amberlyn but his double that their kid met, only we don’t want any false rumors flying around so we’d appreciate their silence. One last thing—they’re probably a family on the south side of the law in a few other ways, so tell them any loose talk and we tell the police they’re blackmailers.”

  Trent smiled a little, shaking his head. “All right,” he said, “we’ll all play the game just the way you do.”

  “I don’t play the game,” Mossy said, “I am the game.”

  When Trent Amberlyn and Curtt Weigerer had left, Elena brought in a pot of tea and two delicate porcelain cups. This was for Louella Parsons, portly, bossy, all-knowing even if much of what she knew wasn’t true. She followed Elena into Mossy’s office, sailing in like a cruise ship tooting her horn with three big hello’s to the studio chief. The problem with Louella was that some of what she knew actually was true. “Didn’t I see Trent Amberlyn outside?” was Louella’s opening gambit. “Is he in trouble again?”

  “He sure is,” Mossy said, ignoring the ‘again’ and pouring tea for Louella, who had built her career not on talent but access and built her access on the almost infinite power of her employer, Mr. Hearst. Mossy sat the gossipist at a little round table well away from his desk, indicating this was a social moment, though of course neither of them was going to let his or her guard down. “Yes, Louella,” Mossy continued, “this is a state secret I’m letting you in on, completely off the record until we release it. Trent was in to announce his engagement, and I’m begging him to hold off until we release his next picture. He may lose the heart of his fan base, which as you know is mostly women.”

  “Why I never,” said Louella. “I couldn’t be more surprised. Is it an actress?”

  Mossy knew she was already thinking this might be a dodge. “You know I’d love to tell you, Lolly, but Trent swore me to secrecy. I promise you’ll be the first to know.”

  Louella wasn’t buying. “It’s around town,” she said, “that he picks up sailors and even got caught with a kid over the weekend.”

  “That’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard,” Mossy laughed.

  “Well, if Hedda prints it and I don’t, Mr. Hearst will want to know what’s holding me up. Who’s the girl, Mossy?”

  Mossy shook his head, smiling. She had him. If he didn’t tell her, she’d print the rumor about Trent being arrested, which wasn’t a rumor anyway but simple fact. His mind whirred, all gears spinning. “Lolly,” he said, “this is an exclusive, and Trent will kill me. I didn’t know myself who the girl was until just now. You can’t print it. Trent told me when he was in the office. It’s Thelma Thacker.”

  Thelma Thacker was a plucky actress who came out from Minneapolis to play best-friend parts, and a couple of times she’d been the wife to bad husbands who left her, but she found her niche, really, in Westerns at other studios. Although Jubilee still held her contract, Mossy had been putting her on loan to Republic and Anchor Bay, a little company where she had graduated into becoming the first female gunslinger by helping Tom Mix chase down some outlaws. Mossy got four times her salary through the loan-out, which was for a serial with fifteen episodes. There was one problem with Thelma Thacker as far as marriage was concerned. Everyone knew she was a lesbian. As soon as he said her name Mossy realized he must have been thinking about homosexuals and he’d come up with perhaps the least likely candidate he could have mentioned.

  “People say Thelma Thacker likes women,” Louella said.

  “If I had a buck for all the things people say,” Mossy told her, pouring her a second cup of tea, “I’d buy Jubilee back from the bankers and make only pictures that uplift the social standards of American civilization.” Mossy knew, of course, that he’d have to call Trent and Thelma as soon as he was rid of Miss Parsons. “Lolly you can’t print this yet. Promise me.”

  “Well, live and learn,” Louella said. “You know, Amos, I had lunch today with Rabbi Magnin.”

  Mossy couldn’t have cared less about this, but he amused himself by envisioning the invincibly gentile Louella Parsons breaking bread with the self-appointed guardian and spiritual guide to the Jews of Hollywood. “And how is Edgar?” Mossy asked with no interest whatsoever.

  “I bring word from Rabbi Magnin that you shouldn’t make Mad Dog of Europe.”

  The property, which Mossy found both funny and horrifying, was a satire on Hitler by the screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, and Mossy knew he could make it cheaply. “The good rabbi has my phone number,” Mossy said.

  “Yes, but he knows you don’t like him. He thinks the movie will bring unwanted attention to members of the Jewish faith.”

  Apparently the lady couldn’t say Jews or even Jewish people. “He does, does he?” Mossy replied.

  “Frankly, Amos, I’ve had my doubts about the project myself. The rabbi said in no uncertain terms that such a picture could only inflame opinion against members of his faith. It will only increase the, uh, problem.”

  “You mean the Jewish problem, Lolly?”

  “That’s exactly what Rabbi Magnin means, and I have to say I agree with him.”

  “There are days, dear, when I almost wish I were a believer. Please don’t write that down. I was joking. That’s as off the record as Thelma Thacker.”

  Elena buzzed Mossy, and he picked up his phone with annoyance. “Elena, you know perfectly well when Miss Parsons is here I don’t—oh yes, all right, put him on.” He looked at Louella and said, “Sorry Lolly, it’s a friend of mine on the Jubilee board in New York. Hello Whitney, you’re at your desk pretty late there, aren’t you?”

  Mossy listened, set his chin, knew he should have gotten Louella Parsons out of the office, and shook his head at himself. “Now Whitney,” he said, “I’ll have to see about that. I’m awfully glad you called … Me? No, I’m not worried at all, not concerned, I simply disagree, and I won’t accept it, I won’t be able to accept it, grateful as I am … ha ha … Sure I’m grateful, why wouldn’t I be? Now I’m holding up your dinner, I know. I’ll call you back tomorrow, Whitney. Thanks.”

  Mossy was at his peak here, like one of those creatures—rattler? buzzard? stag?—that does everything without intent, operating solely on reflex. He darts or springs. He swoops. He bites, chews, swallows. What came across as murderous impetuosity was only Mossy’s being in tight communion with impulse. Even when, like a chess player who devises a dozen moves ahead, he seemed to be plotting, he was really only driving intuitively toward his target. The fight-or-flight synapses in Mossy were like tuning forks that, placed properly, can make an entire structure shudder with their vibrations. His impulses were as joined to his acts as a trigger on a pistol is to its hammer.

  Shaking his head again, this time at Louella, Mossy smiled. “They want to increase my salary, can you imagine that? At this time, in this year? The board wants me to accept … Ouch! Ow!” Suddenly Mossy doubled over in pain.

  Louella hurried around the little table. Mossy was growing pale. He crumpled to the floor, writhing. “What can I do, Amos?” Louella asked.

  Mossy pushed out his words. “So sorry, Lolly. It’s my ulcers. Again. This time it’s, oh God, worse. Anyway, you won’t find me taking a raise when the Depression is forcing me, ow, to cut people every month. Will you excuse me, Lolly, and please don’t write anything about this, promise me, but I’ll have to go into Cedars, I’m afraid.”

  Louella Parsons rushed out and Elena rushed in. Mossy straightened up and resumed his chair. “I’m going to have to lie low at damn Cedars for a few days, maybe a week,” he said. “Elena, the sons of bitches in New York want to fire me.”

  “They what?” Elena said. “They can’t do that.”

  “Greedy pissants, t
hey say I lost too much money in 1933. The truth is, Jubilee was ahead last year while Fox was going bankrupt and the others were hurting. It’s their goddamn theater chain that’s losing by booking dogshit stinkers from other studios.”

  “That’s enough to put anyone in the hospital,” Elena said.

  “Get me Dr. Kleinhans, we’ll have to book a room at Cedars while I figure this out. They can’t fire a man who’s in the hospital. After that, get me young Jant, he could use a piece of candy. First, Winchell. He won’t be at the Stork Club yet.”

  Elena got Walter Winchell on the phone, and Mossy leaked the exclusive that Jubilee’s financiers in New York wanted to install one of their own—which meant an old-line moneyed Episcopalian like themselves—as head of the studio so they could control him. All the premier newspaper columnist in America needed was a veiled hint of anti-Semitism to run with a scorching unsourced item, leaving Mossy in the clear and, since Winchell was in New York, giving the impression to the Jubilee board that it was one of their own members who had sprung the leak. Mossy asked the columnist to wait a day before writing the story because he was going into the hospital for painful ulcers and wanted the bastards on Wall Street to know what they’d done to him. By the time Winchell’s story appeared in the New York Daily Mirror two days later Mossy was safely ensconced in the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital.

  Winchell wrote that the Jubilee board of directors had driven Amos Zangwill to have an ulcer attack, and it wasn’t certain the doctors would be able to save his stomach. The phenomenally successful studio chief and exuberant picture maker might be on a bland diet for the remainder of his short life. The board ought to be ashamed of itself, especially if its nefarious plan to unseat Zangwill had anything to do with the prejudices that had landed Germany in its fascist sinkhole and were threatening to make their way across the ocean. The columnist listed Mossy’s successes and achievements in molding great stars such as Palmyra Millevoix and Trent Amberlyn. If the big boys on Wall Street intended to shoehorn one of their own into the leadership of a Hollywood studio they’d find out what a sham and shame it was to sell short on Amos Zangwill.

  Cowering before the onslaught of Mossy’s ulcer attack and Winchell’s condemnation, the board of directors immediately denied the rumor, producing a contract extension and, eventually, the very raise Mossy had lied to Louella Parsons about. For her part, Louella had the exclusive on being present at the ulcer attack itself as well as announcing the impending engagement of one of Hollywood’s shiniest stars, whom she was not yet at liberty to name.

  Mossy was so preoccupied with outwitting his New York bankers that he never came close to making The Mad Dog of Europe, leaving the anti-Hitler field to the more artistic hands of Charlie Chaplin. Years later Mossy told me he’d been a fool to pay any attention to Rabbi Magnin or his shikse representative. “A helluva mistake not to produce that picture,” Mossy said. “Can you imagine—a rabbi telling a Christian to tell a Jew not to make a movie criticizing the biggest anti-Semite in history?” But what even Mossy didn’t know and Louella Parsons had labored to forget was that, though she’d been a Catholic for as long as she cared to recall, she was born a Jew.

  Mossy’s summons for me that afternoon was to tell me to get out of town. When Comfort O’Hollie came for me I was so excited the boss wanted to see me again that I ran from the writers building to the executive offices two studio blocks away. Maybe Mossy had had second thoughts about taking me off A Doll’s House and was now relenting, seeing that while changes were needed I was the one to make them. But maybe his second thoughts were about letting me stay at Jubilee in any capacity at all. With tremors of both hope and fear, I sidled past Elena into the throne room. Mossy, however, was not given to second thoughts; they were not in his nature.

  “Take the Lark.” That was all he said at first. A lark was what I wanted. I deserved a little fun after what I’d been through that day. “Get yourself out of town,” he went on. “Wha, what do you mean?” I stammered. He was kicking me off the lot for good. “Get up to San Francisco,” he said, “I like the overnight train, the Lark.”

  He wanted to make a movie about the earthquake of 1906, but he had no story. He wanted me to talk to survivors for a few days. “Get me some idea of what they went through,” he told me, “who were the heroes, the cowards, what about the police and fire departments? Come back with four or five characters we can play with.” Mossy didn’t like the books he’d seen about the earthquake, or had his readers read, because they all blamed the earthquake and fire damage on divine vengeance or poor architecture. Bad city planning and construction. The people’s own fault, not the San Andreas Fault or any other California tectonic plates shifting their weight around. Zeus hurled a thunderbolt of caprice. Sinners were being punished; a decadent way of life in the wickedest city since Sodom was being wiped out. Instead, Mossy wanted people’s own stories. “Take a thousand from Curtt Weigerer,” he said, “spread it around to people you talk to, treat yourself to some high class pussy, bring me back a treatment for a picture.”

  I was thrilled yet daunted. I was sure I couldn’t do what he wanted alone. “Jim Bicker is a fine judge of down-to-earth people,” I told Mossy, realizing it was a mistake as soon as the words were out of my mouth, but I blundered on. “Maybe Poor Jim should go with me, we’ll see twice as many people in half the time.”

  Mossy looked at me as if I were a gnat he’d somehow misjudged for a butterfly. “Jant, do you want to be a writer or do you want to be an assistant Communist?”

  “Of course,” I said weakly, “I’m a writer. I simply thought—”

  “You goddamn didn’t think at all! You guys would just hunt up the most bedraggled survivor and find out he lived in a house cheaply built by some capitalist greedmonger, and the whole natural disaster of the earthquake is reduced to a fat wad of injustice. You’re so impressionable, Jant, and Bicker will wrap you around his finger and then wrap a red flag around you. If that’s what you want, go work somewhere else.”

  I understood he was offering me a little plum to offset my demoralizing experience of being kicked off a script. I understood he didn’t ordinarily do that with writers he canned. I understood I’d been a fool. I understood it might be too late. “Sorry,” I said. “Bad idea.”

  “I’ve had some myself. Often wrong, never in doubt. Relax, Owen. There’s only the one tale, how we suffer and how we’re delighted. Go tell it. Bring forth what’s in you, and it will save you. If you don’t, it will destroy you—or else I will, take your choice. Bring me some good stories, I’ll let you work on the script with Jamie McPhatter. Not Bicker, for Christ’s sake. Get out of here! You waiting for a chauffeur?”

  Jamieson McPhatter was the inflated blimp who had been with Sylvia Solomon at Mossy’s party. He was capable of blowing his own horn until everyone had left any room he was in. But he had worked on DeMille’s Ben Hur, the silent one, and on an early version of The Last Days of Pompeii. It was widely assumed by producers he could do catastrophes and natural disasters better than anyone since Noah got flooded in Genesis.

  As I went to my Essex to drive home, I saw police cars roar onto the lot, followed by an ambulance. They squealed up to the executive building. A moment later Mossy was carried out on a stretcher, accompanied by two grave-looking doctors in full hospital white, stethoscopes at the ready. Alarmed, I saw Mossy loaded gently into the rear of the ambulance. I hurried back to the writers building to call Elena. She said our chief had had a sudden severe attack of ulcers, possibly complicated by a strangulated hernia, but I shouldn’t worry. He was going into Cedars for a few days. It was a precaution. “Don’t worry,” Elena repeated, her tone confidential, a tone I didn’t understand as I also couldn’t understand why I shouldn’t worry. “Keep going on whatever he told you to do,” said Elena, hanging up. A moment later I heard the police and ambulance sirens screaming as the chief was borne off the lot, screaming, I realized years later, Mossy Zangwill’s Bronx cheer to the rubes on Wall Street
who had thought, only an hour earlier, that they had his number.

  It was a precaution all right. In my head as I drove home, I drafted the get well note to my boss. Would it look too presumptuous if I sent flowers too?

  14

  Recoveries

  Reassured by Elena that the boss was going to be all right, I danced back to Jubilee the next day to prepare my assault on San Francisco. Mossy had beaten New York so badly that it raised his salary from ten thousand a week to twelve thousand, not petty cash in those days. “Too muchee,” said Pammy when she heard about this. “He’s making and taking too much, and I’m going to get him to put the raise into a fund for actors he treats like slaves.” “Good luckee,” said Trent Amberlyn, who hadn’t yet been informed about the identity of his fiancée, Thelma Thacker, whom he had never met. “An arranged marriage like in India where the bride and groom meet on their wedding day.”

  Yet it was fun, even on a diet of daily anxiety. Was it an accident the studios had been built on the Tehachapi fault line, site of a women’s penitentiary and—fate was laughing—source of our periodic earthquakes? When earthquakes struck while a scene was being shot, actors ran to stand under the set’s door frames, supposedly the strongest part of a room, though the door frames were false. At times the fear itself could be fun.

  Only Wordsworth accurately described Hollywood in the Thirties: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/ But to be young was very heaven.” The solidest flesh belonged to Amos Zangwill, who wasn’t the usual kind of idealist at all. “Only the paranoid survive,” said Mossy. In his insouciance and his focus he was a bridge, last of the old-time studio chiefs who ruled by decree, first of the modern executives with their committees and foot soldiers all over town.