Girl of My Dreams

by Peter Davis

  “Palmyra Millevoix skipped the fire,” Tutor Beedleman said as we walked back to the writers building. As if I hadn’t noticed her absence. She stayed in the dressing room on her set when everyone else ran out to see the show. Achilles sulking in the tent? Or was she, as she liked to put it, found in thought? A sucker for punishment, I went to her set because I hadn’t seen her since the day I’d spied the dreadful telegram to Mossy and she told me to get lost, or that’s how I came to see it. Millie and Millie’s nursemaid Costanza were just leaving after a visit; Pammy hadn’t dashed out because she didn’t want Millie to see the fire and be frightened into nightmares.

  Mother and daughter were finishing a book together, each reciting successive sentences. “When the fisherman put his little boat away at sunset,” Millie read, “he noticed his tar-tar-tarp?”—“tarpaulin,” Pammy prompted—“was neatly folded.” “He knew,” Pammy read, “that he hadn’t left it that way in the morning, so he raced home to his cottage not letting himself even hope who he would find there.” “In less time than it takes for a fish to jump out of the sea,” Millie read, “the lonely fisherman was lonely no more, for the girl of his dreams had returned from the faraway mountain and was lighting the wood in his stove for their dinner.”

  Millie looked up at me strangely. “I don’t know you. You’re not my father.”

  “Oh,” I said and began to back out the dressing room door. What misery had led the girl to that statement? Anything I’d done? Quick as I was to blame myself, I didn’t think I was the cause. What, then, had led this unfrightened normally happy little girl to say that? But she saw me retreating and before her mother could jump in with a reprimand to her or an apology to me, Millie said, “Uncle O, when did you come in?”

  From what mountain of her own had she returned? “Your reading is getting so good,” I said, “I’d come from a faraway mountain myself just to hear you read.”

  “Mrs. Pammy,” Costanza said, “if we gonna pick out a present for Millie to bring to the birthday party, we better vamoose.” As a Filipina, Costanza was a favorite of Pammy’s both for her loyalty and as someone with whom she could speak Spanish. Unlike the starched, white-uniformed nannies then popular among successful movie people, Costanza carried within her an exotic flavor that mixed Asia with Europe, serenity with impulse. When Millie almost hugged me but kept her distance, I tried to avoid making a little count of the reasons I wished I really were her father.

  “Almost eight,” Pammy said to me when they’d left. “All I remember is her clinging to my breasts like a bumblebee. I respected her for how much she wanted to live off me, but she stung me down to my toes. Do I sound okay? I had polyps taken out of my nose yesterday and I can’t tell if I still have a voice?”

  I said she sounded fine. Actually, she seemed a trifle hoarse, like a torch singer, which I found sexy. Perhaps today her voice was merely sparkling wine. She wore a pearl-colored silk dressing gown that crossed just above her breasts, revealing more than I dared look at. “But it’s too soon after surgery for you to try,” I said.

  “Hush,” she said, “Let’s sing.” She said that when she wanted to break a mood.

  She went over to the little upright she had in the dressing room. Pammy’s contract stipulated there had to be a piano anyplace the studio put her, even in a small dressing room on a sound stage. “RCA wants a new recording of ‘Born Blue,’” she said. “With a fresh chorus to add to the old. The album is ready and waiting except for this song. There are some new notes in this version. I want to kick it a bit.”

  “But then won’t it be more Hollywood than blues?”

  “Thanks. Don’t apologize, I probably needed to hear that. My excuse is times are changing and this isn’t 1931 anymore. Times are a little more up-tempo. Why shouldn’t my song keep up with that? Anyway, have a look at the lyrics.”

  “I don’t think I want to,” I said.

  Pammy put the sheet music over her mouth. “I forgot about the telegram. I’m so sorry I put you through that, Owen.” She laid a hand—a condescending hand, but I treasured the touch—on my arm. She chuckled. “Don’t worry, this isn’t a love song, it’s still a sad one. Anyway, I’m furious at Mossy over the pay cuts, which I can’t believe he needed. I’m breaking it off with him. He’s a scoundrel and he can go chase a starlet or slink home to poor Esther Leah if she’ll have him. She’s taken the children to Baltimore to visit her family, and I’m absolutely flushing the bastard out of my life next weekend. Take a look while I try out my pipes.”

  She put the sheet music in front of me, handwritten with her notes penciled and her lyrics in ink. “Brand new ‘Born Blue,’” I said.

  “Warners couldn’t resculpt Rin Tin Tin,” she said, “but they could do it to me. I was mad after their goddamned plastic surgery, and sad. I was suspended, my new country was in the dumps. That led to ‘Born Blue’ originally, down below your ankles blues. I’ve been fiddling, so here goes. Do you think these stanzas might help?”

  Pammy wasn’t normally pretentious. I found it curious—annoying even—that she said stanzas and not verses or chorus.

  She played and sang:

  The gay things I recall—

  Late spring and early fall—

  Gave me joy and joyful clues,

  Gave me all that I could choose.

  Singing to the sunrise, to the sunset too,

  Singing to a chorus of people just like you.

  But my happiness is followed,

  Yes it always has been hollowed,

  By the can’t-quite-prophesy-it, wish-that-I-knew-why-it blues.

  Shows up like a singer or an actor on cue,

  I never can forget it,

  It’s hardly to my credit,

  For I was born, my heart is torn—

  Yes I say, born, born, born—

  Blue, blue blue.

  She played the final chord and sat back, clearly waiting, as clearly as if she’d cocked her head at me, which she was too proud to do.

  What could I say to Pammy? It was still blue, but she’d lightened it by injecting a note of self-rebuke that made it seem as if the person singing was an oddball for being melancholy since the acceptable way to be was happy. I didn’t like that suggestion, yet I didn’t want to discourage her and I was also afraid to tell her and risk evaporating what I flattered myself was our friendship.

  I didn’t have to tell her.

  “You hate it,” she said.

  “Well, no,” I began, “I could never hate anything that came from you. It’s just that this is kind of … ” I stammered. “Kind of, maybe, dry. I don’t know.”

  “Dry,” she said.

  “As if there’s something wrong with someone who doesn’t think happy days are here again.”

  “Dry,” she repeated. “Yes, I haven’t got the new version right yet, it hasn’t come together, and I have to make it fit with the old version that I’ll be rerecording. I’ll tickle it at home tonight. It needs some torch. Then I’ll know how to sell it.”

  By sell I knew she meant putting the song across when she sang it, not sell as in market. Though I reflected possibly they were the same thing.

  She started scribbling changes on her score in a frenzy, but she looked up once and said, “Please don’t go yet.”

  The rhyme scheme of the stanzas, as she referred to them, was rather complex. Aa, bb, cc, dd, b, which contained an interior rhyme, followed by c, ee, ff, c. I suppose “Born Blue” has proved to be outside the canon of either blues or popular music, living a kind of autonomous life in the musical ether, somewhat like Porter’s later “Begin the Beguine,” which blends classical and popular elements, or the earlier Berlin standard, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” which has no ragtime in it whatsoever and is wonderful.

  Many of the women who wrote hit songs in those days are no longer names we recognize, and the main reason we know Palmyra Millevoix is that she was also an actress. But we do still have some of the other women’s songs, as we have Pamm
y’s. “Fine and Dandy” by Kay Swift is still played, and so are “Willow Weep for Me” by Ann Ronnell and “Close Your Eyes” by Bernice Petkere. The female songwriter we know best from that era is Dorothy Fields, who was responsible, with her collaborator Jimmy McHugh, for “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby,” “Exactly Like You,” and “I’m in the Mood for Love.” With her occasional collaborator Jerome Kern, Fields wrote “The Way You Look Tonight,” for which the pair won Academy Awards. With McHugh she wrote “Blue Again,” a fine song though it never pushed into the category of Pammy’s “Born Blue.” When Palmyra Millevoix saw Dorothy Fields at a movie premiere, Fields told her she wished she’d written “Where’s the Good in Goodbye,” to which my Pammy (my—what a laugh on me, but let it stand) replied she’d give anything except her daughter to have written “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” “How I’d like to leave my worries on the doorstep,” Pammy quoted as flashbulbs popped and she gave Dorothy a hug.

  After she stopped scribbling her changes for “Born Blue,” which she would keep changing until the moment she rerecorded it, Pammy turned to me and said, “Since you’ve midwifed my song, could you do something else?”

  She knew I’d jump off Pike’s Peak for her. “Why not?” I said.

  She handed me a slip of paper. “Call this number and ask how late someone will be there today?”

  A raspy-voiced woman answered the phone and I said I was calling for Palmyra Millevoix. Pammy shook her head vigorously; she’d meant the call to be anonymous. I blundered on, having no idea whom I’d reached. I asked how long the woman’s office would be open today. “My office? Is that what she calls it?” The voice sounded like a sneer. “Well, you can inform Miss Millevoix, s’il vous plaît, that someone or other will be right here at, ah, West Coast Headquarters, until seven this evening.”

  “The Communists keep pestering me,” Pammy said when I hung up, “and I want to help them but keep them away. I have an old Plymouth I never use any more. It’s on the lot next to my LaSalle. Could you be a perfect dear and deliver it to them? If I show up myself they’ll take pictures or at least call every reporter they know.”

  “But if I take it to them,” I said, “they’ll still know it’s yours. Won’t they gab?” Gab: my stab at gangster lingo since we were engaged in an undercover operation.

  She rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “Yes and no, because it’ll be yours. Watch.”

  Pammy pulled out the pink slip California issued car owners. In the space for purchaser she wrote Owen Jant; the previous owner was listed as Pamela Miles, her old pseudonym. Defying logic, the pink slip had a line for who was actually selling the car, as though it could be someone besides the owner. “This should give anyone a double take,” she said, “who might be trying to make sense of the transaction.” With a smile, she designated the seller as Goddard Minghoff. “That will mess up the chain of title enough to bewilder any Red Squad,” she said puckishly.

  Like so many blessings, the car was to come from God. She warned me to take all other identifying material out of the glove compartment so that anyone using it would simply be driving a 1929 Plymouth and not a car that had belonged to a movie star. On the piece of paper she’d given me with the phone number was an address in Venice. The car itself, when I saw it, had no rear bumper, a broken taillight and a dented front fender.

  The short drive from the Jubilee lot in Culver City to Venice took me from a real place devoted to the imaginary to an imagined district that had been forced to accept reality. The dreamer who plotted the Southern California version of Venice, a tobacco tycoon, excavated his own Grand Canal around which he built homes for motion picture royalty. He dug his ditches and flooded them to provide side-street canals, along which he put luxury homes and tropical flowers. Gambling casinos sprouted on the boardwalk, along with an amusement park on a pier that hung out over the Pacific. By the time the tobacco baron succumbed to his occupational hazard—lung cancer—the silent star Francis X. Bushman was having parties for Rudolph Valentino on the Grand Canal.

  But one day, according to the controlling real estate legend, bubbles appeared in one of the subsidiary canals. And then a kind of rainbow in the water, and after that an unsightly slick. The Venetian dream did an about-face. Goodbye to movie star mansions, hello to ugly oil derricks whose pumps looked like praying mantises, hello to a narcissistic slum and eventually to a throbbing little bohemia. The villas under construction became broken phantoms of themselves, ruins before they were even finished. Oil wells turned the precinct into a noisy, smelly, contaminated skid row. Along one of the streets servicing a minor canal in 1934 was an office, or outpost, or subdivision, or just hangout, of another dream that had been imported to Southern California: the Communist Party.

  As I pulled up at the hut that served as Venice HQ for the Reds, I was not exactly greeted but challenged—as if she were a sentry—by the sour woman I’d spoken to when Pammy asked me to make the phone call. “So you’re the one running errands for Miss Millevoix?” This was less a question than an insult. The woman seemed to be composed of blocks, as burly as she was surly, a rectangular block for her legs, a chunky block for her torso, and an almost perfectly cubic block for her head, a block with a sneer. The woman pronounced Pammy’s name in a tone mocking radio announcers on gossip shows about the stars. “You mean to tell me,” she went on, “that this wreck is what the great Palmyra Millevoix drives herself around in? Hee hee.”

  “I called you,” I said, “but I only used her name so you wouldn’t hang up. This Plymouth is mine. I took your number from someone at the studio.”

  “Be that as it may.” She looked at me skeptically. “Palmyra agrees with us like a comrade and she’s also afraid of us. Not that we care, as long as we have wheels so we can get around to recruit and organize. You’re at Jubilee too? Hee hee hee.” Her laughter suggested she’d caught me committing a minor felony. She advanced—menacingly I thought—to take the keys and snatch the pink slip out of my hand.

  “Sometimes I’m there,” I said, trying to be a little cagey to protect Pammy and some figment I was forming of myself as secret courier.

  “All right, Mr. Jant.” She glanced at the pink slip. “The Party is much obliged.”

  “Thank you, Miss … I don’t know your name.”

  “And you don’t need to. I suppose you need a lift somewhere.”

  Those were the last words she spoke to me. She gave me a ride back to Jubilee in the Plymouth but said nothing the whole time. I looked at the little cube that was her head, aptly topped with red hair, trying to think of something to say, but her adamant profile itself was a vow of silence as stern as a nun’s. Irked she was, and—despite the gift of a car that would help her make more Reds—irked she stayed. When she dropped me back at the gates of Jubilee, she barely slowed down. I thanked her, but she had already ground the gears of the Plymouth into low and was speeding off.

  Returning to my office, I found the telegram Comfort had placed on my Royal. OWNERS THREATENING TO OPEN PORT BY FORCE STOP THIS WILL MEAN WAR STOP REGARDS, QUIN

  21

  Forward and Backward

  Nils Maynard asked me to come to his cutting room that Sunday so I could be a guinea pig when he ran a sequence of a new picture he was shooting. Sundays were lonely days I didn’t like or that didn’t like me. My idyll with Jasmine/Janice, a tumble of delight even if it led nowhere, had been the exception proving the rule. I was glad to have somewhere to go.

  Especially after the night before. Esther Leah was still away with the children, and Mossy had thrown an almost-stag party—almost meant a few men brought dates or wives they thought would impress the host. I was invited at the last minute to fill out the stag part, and I suggested to Mossy I bring a tennis pro I’d met because I knew he’d like the jock aspect and tennis lessons were fashionable at the time. “Perfect idea, kid,” said Mossy, “just what will spice up the premises. I’ll let everyone know.”

  The night was a disaster. By the
time I picked him up at his apartment in Hollywood, the tennis pro was already reeking of Scotch. Though he’d looked elegantly presentable on the court in his long white pants and slicked hair that was never mussed even after a difficult point, Ansel—I remember only his first name—was socially impossible. “Will there be babes there?” was the first thing he said as he settled into my car. I couldn’t not bring Ansel because he was now advertised to the other guests by Mossy as someone who would cure their backhands. “What’s the chances of a piece of ass?” Ansel asked. I told him we were going to the home of a big studio head, my boss, and I hoped he’d meet some nice people who would want lessons from him. “No need to worry about me,” he said, “because I’ll fuck a starlet as soon as a star.”

  This stag party was worse than most because the couple of dozen men were inhibited around the four or five women, and there seemed little to do but drink. Ansel led the way with Scotch highballs, and he made a clumsy, pawing move at a maid serving canapés. I saw Mossy flush with anger, but his lawyer Edgar Globe’s flirtatious wife, Francesca, did ask Ansel about lessons. As he finished demonstrating his spin serve, the drunken pro brought his hand down slowly across her chest, and Francesca giggled as Edgar Globe pushed Ansel away. “What do you all do here for relaxation,” the pro asked a group of men that included the dignified actor Edward Everett Horton, “screw each other’s wives?” When Horton glowered at him, Ansel said, “Oops, attempted overhead goes into the net.” He made passes at two of the women, whose husbands were unamused. The women had no trouble swatting him away. “Aw, double fault,” said Ansel. Just before dinner was served he peed into a small palm tree encased in a porcelain vase finished in cloisonné enamel. Francesca Globe joked that Ansel was more potted than the palm.

  I tried to drag my mistake away, but Mossy insisted we stay for dinner. Why did he keep us there? Did he think this was in some buffoonish way funny, or was he piling up offenses? The pro sat at the table ossified, silent, foodless. I thought his head would fall forward into his untouched soup, but instead he slumped sideways into the lap of a producer’s wife. Only then was I permitted to take the useless drunk home. “Lost in straight sets,” said the producer, who harvested a laugh at Ansel’s expense.