Girl of My Dreams

by Peter Davis

  “He doesn’t want much,” I said, “just your take on a couple of scenes he has already made notes on.” I hoped she didn’t know I’d worked on the script myself.

  “Do you realize what he’s doing with A Doll’s House? And what I’m collaborating in? Jubilee Pictures is repealing the declaration of independence for women, written to our shame by a man, and turning the great Ibsen into a shill for traditional subjugated domesticity. Shit.”

  This was her warmup, the warmup of self-contempt I saw many writers perform before plunging their talents into an assignment that made them drink more and think even less of themselves. She looked at the pages. “Ah well,” she said, “at least Mossy isn’t quite as loathsome as Gravier and Stallworth. Those two buffoons should be battered to death with their own typewriters by the even more loathsome Colonel DeLight.” I said I thought Colonel DeLight was sort of the advocate for writers at Jubilee, someone who stuck up for us against the bullying of the executives. I didn’t mention I’d been suspicious of him myself since he hustled me out of the room filled with the Mexican seamstresses.

  “Colonel DeLight,” she mumbled, not looking up from the script, “wishes he could fire the writers and have monkeys write the scripts. Count your fingers after you shake his hand.”

  She was silent for a minute as she studied the pages. “No,” she said, “Mossy’s not as bad as Gravier and Stallworth. You ready to write, Owen?”

  “Pencil poised, legal pad balanced on my knee.”

  “All right, the zoo. We’re sketching scenes, not rewriting the damn script.”

  Zoo? I wondered. I hadn’t even had a zoo in my version.

  “A horrible scene in a dinky little smalltown excuse for a zoo,” she went on. “No, the hell with that, it’s the god damn circus. This town wouldn’t even have a zoo, but a traveling circus they could have. Mossy will just have to spend a dime and get more extras along with a few more animals in cages. Put in the circus. The family is coming out of the big tent, two parents, two excited kids. Nora is bored. Tom—we’re still calling Torvald that, aren’t we?—is herding everyone to the car and home where he wants Nora to make dinner for some of his golfing pals. She’s disgusted. The kids want to see the bear in his cage. The bear is being fed after performing and as the family watches, the bear swats his trainer and piles out of the cage toward the kids. Nora sweeps her children out of the way while Tom pushes a vendor’s stand in front of the bear. It’s an ineffective gesture. The bear overturns the stand and lumbers toward Nora and the kids. Nora takes an iron pipe that had held up the canopy over the vendor’s stand, and she hits the bear as hard as she can on the nose. The bear is stunned and in pain, and by now the animal keepers and trainers have surrounded it. In the car Tom says his little birdie Nora was a very good birdie but he’s proud he pushed the vendor’s stand in front of the bear since it saved them all. Close-up on Nora with a men-are-idiots look on her face. Hah! End of scene.” Sylvia was temporarily appeased by her modest rebellion.

  “Gravier,” she said, “had Nora cowering with the children while Tom battled the bear. Who’s the driver in this picture anyway? Not goddam Tom, for Christ’s sake. Nora’s the driver. The way they wrote it even my aunt wouldn’t have agreed to play Nora. The husband should never push the action, it’s really almost a minor part, a foil. Nora’s much too passive in the earlier script. Claudette Colbert wouldn’t touch it, Joan Crawford would spit at it. Did you get my take on this, Owen?”

  “I think so,” I said, still scribbling.

  “Good. Let’s head for the finish line. Nora leaves home. Cut Torvald’s promise to make things better for her—I mean Tom—and have him just ask if she knows what she’s doing. She knows, all right. She’s leaving this dumpy Wisconsin backwater and her dinners for people he’s about to have his bank foreclose on, and she’s heading for Chicago to work in an advertising agency, no, to do publicity for an American tour by Gertrude Stein, a free woman if ever there was one. Take that, Gravier and Stallworth. Tom is furious, insisting her home and her duties are in Wisconsin, but she is even more furious. ‘I don’t hold,’ Nora says coldly, ‘to your concept of duty, either yours or mine.’ Tom is speechless with rage and disbelief, but it is the rage of a weakened man who can’t control anything in his life anymore, especially his wife. Nora remains firm. Mossy’s right to cross out Gravier’s ridiculous moment of having her begin to melt. She never wavers here. Seeing that his fury has no effect, Tom slows down and tries his sweet little birdie approach the way he used to, the way she used to like. Nora no like anymore. The scene ends with Nora slamming the door and heading with a single bag for the bus that will take her to the big city. Put a note at the top. We’re changing the title. From now on it’s She’s NOT a Doll, put NOT in caps. Let Mossy choke on that one. I bet you aren’t used to taking dictation, Owen.”

  “No.” But I’d come to expect anything today.

  “Not the way it usually is, is it? An older woman giving dictation to a younger man. Usually just the opposite, and when they’re all through the older man chases the young thing around his desk, ha ha. Sure you won’t have a drink, Owen?”

  I was still catching up to her scene dictation.

  “But,” Sylvia continued, “but the sequence doesn’t quite end there, unfortunately, because I have to add the part I’ll hate myself for in the morning but that hints at last-reel redemption for Tom. He follows her out with the two children in hand, and we see Tom, a saddened and remorseful Tom, watching Nora leave, and we feel a twinge of sympathy for a chastened man who is burdened with the chores and the children as well as his job, and who may just have learned a bit of a lesson. Scene: she’ll arrive in Chicago. But that’s enough. My typewriter’s over there, Owen, blank pages on the left.”

  As I typed fast and Sylvia went through two more cigarettes accompanied by gin, she became enthusiastic. “I know what we’ll do with her in Chicago,” she said. “Nora’s going to be just fine—for a while anyway, sending a little subversive signal to the ladies out there.” She laughed at herself. “Now rush this over to Mossy, will you honey?”

  Honey, I thought to myself. What does that mean? We’re social friends now? You’re a nice kid, don’t let Mossy beat you up too much? Run along little boy?

  I was gathering the pages and proofing my typing when Sylvia spoke again.

  “How would you like to go to a party tonight, Owen … ?”

  I interrupted her with a question of my own. “Did you say publicity or agent for Gertrude Stein?” But I had also heard her question. She wanted me to go with her to a Hollywood party. Then all Mossy’s humilation was almost worthwhile because now this rich prominent Hollywood writer was taking me seriously. Anyplace she went would be touched with gold. Maybe Fairbanks would be there. Pickford. A young star like Cary Grant or a king like Chaplin himself. This was my chance that came about because I did something stupid with the drunken tennis pro. Sylvia herself was pretty, I was beginning to see, not exactly pretty but sexy, a lower lip that beckoned when it didn’t have the cigarette resting on it, a nose that pointed with possibility, eyes that asked a question.

  “I meant publicity,” she said, “but if it came out agent don’t worry about it. Hurry, will you, honey? I was asking if you’d like to come to a Party meeting tonight. You can make it if you drive fast and make short work of old Mossy.”

  “He has things he wants me to do.”

  Predictably, Sylvia was indignant. “On a Sunday! How can you let him treat you this way?” She seemed to feel it was an insult to her that Mossy made me an errand boy. And she didn’t even know about the shoes, the pants, the boutonniere.

  “This is how I’m learning the business, I guess.”

  “It’s no business,” she said. “It’s handcuffs made of platinum.”

  “Yours maybe,” I said. “Mine are just steel like regular handcuffs.”

  “Well, hurry,” she said, and then she added, “Please.”

  A Party meeting, I thought.
That meant Party with a capital P which meant only one thing in this town, and no way to get out of it. I was not an equal to Sylvia Solomon, certainly not a date. I was merely a potential recruit.

  Mossy was pleased with the changes. “Count on old Sylvia to come up with something I can use and an audience can eat. This will turn into a script I can show Stanwyck. I’ve decided I want to wear gray shoes tonight after all. Shine them up.”

  “I thought I’d done my penance,” I said.

  “Not yet. The gray shoes and polish are here in the butler’s pantry.”

  “I … I have an appointment. I’ll be late.”

  “Sylvia hitting on your bones already?”

  “No.”

  “Sure she is. What I said is go shine my shoes. Now. Maybe we’ll forget about the pool today. But this is a memory lesson, young fellow. Get cracking.”

  Which I did. My final labor for the day. Degradation complete. If I were in something like Pilgrim’s Progress, I was about to be released from the Vale of Shame.

  Why did he treat me, or anyone, like this? A better question, I knew, was why did I let him? The answer to the second question was simple. If I craved preferment—and I did—where else could I make $275 a week in 1934?

  At my house, where I quickly changed into clean clothes for Sylvia, a telegram awaited: GENERAL STRIKE MENTIONED STOP WHEN WILL FANTASY PEDDLERS DROP GILDED GUARD AND BE SOCKED BY REALITY STOP QUIN

  23

  On the Night in Question

  Did I even know how to dress for a Communist Party party? I was too young not to wear a tie. When I called for Sylvia she looked better—slinky—and didn’t smell of cigarettes or gin. Catching my glance, she said, “A nap and a bath still work wonders on an old dame, don’t they?” Her perfume was faintly verbena, alluring if not exactly seductive.

  The gathering of the faithful was in Santa Monica on La Mesa Drive at a large white stucco house with a red-tiled Spanish roof. The back of the house overlooked the Riviera golf course and great sward of polo field in Mandeville Canyon, divided by a hill from where my Sumac Lane shanty squatted in Santa Monica Canyon. So many cars were lined up on La Mesa that two uniformed Mexicans were running back and forth parking them. “That’s a hoot,” said Sylvia as we pulled up in her Chrysler, “valets at a Red rally.” I saw some Chevys but they were outnumbered by Pierce-Arrows, Lincolns, Cadillacs. Two couples arrived in chauffeur-driven limousines. They were a hoot too.

  Inquisitive energy hummed above the voices raised in greeting. Strangely, this was the one Party party I was ever asked about when the Fifties rolled around. The party’s nominal purpose was to raise money for the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, nine young black Alabamans accused of raping two white women in a boxcar. All the meetings I went to, all the demonstrations, this is the only one they seemed to have a record of, and of course the FBI agents expected total recall of an event that occurred twenty years earlier. For once, thanks to my diary (which I never told them about), they were right. The FBI haunted all of us who were present for this occasion.

  We were shown in by a kind of usher who looked disconcertingly like me—short hair, neatly combed, an earnest, unforgiving expression, eager both to please and to be superior. He was carefully dressed down in overalls and a work shirt. We moved past banners saying FREE THE BOYS and STAND FOR SOMETHING OR YOU’LL FALL FOR ANYTHING toward a silver hors d’ouvres tray featuring crudite and oysters. The tray was being passed formally by a butler—tall, dark and handsome—who wore black trousers, a white waistcoat, black bow tie and starched white shirt. “Working-class chic is apparently only for white people,” Sylvia murmured, her lips almost touching my ear.

  “Darling Sylvia, thank God, at last a friendly face.” Our hostess, known on both coasts as the widow Flower, waved at Sylvia with her mother-of-pearl cigarette holder. For an instant as they hugged I was afraid the cigarette itself would light my improbable date’s hair on fire. “My precious,” the widow Flower continued, “what an extraordinarily fresh young face you’ve contrived to bring with you.” The word young, I surmised, was as far as she’d go toward an accusation of cradle-robbery.

  Sylvia introduced me to Gloriana Onslow Flower, an unrepentant snob out of her time and place. “Bertrand,” she called out to the tray-bearing butler, “make sure our dear friends have all the oysters in the sea.” Our hostess, Sylvia whispered, belonged not at a party promoting revolution but in pre-Revolutionary Paris vying with Marie Antoinette and Madame de Staël for the best salons and lovers.

  She had begun, Sylvia went on, as Gloriana Onslow of the ancient but fallen Onslows of Massachusetts, related to Cabots, Lowells and Peabodys. At twenty-two she became an O’Brian, of the construction O’Brians, six or eight steps down socially but representing an enormous coup economically. This meant she had the wherewithal to live as an Onslow should but hadn’t been able to do since the middle of the nineteenth century when alcohol, improvidence and rash marriages had drained the family substance.

  It was said no nail was pounded between Hartford and Portland that was not hauled from Boston and hammered by an O’Brian carpenter. Eugene O’Brian was only Anglo-Irish, not fully leprechaun Irish, which meant that a few homes in Louisburg Square did not close their doors to Gloriana and her husband. Eugene knew he had married status if not frugality, and it pleased him to think his sons might one day be admitted to St. Paul’s. Gloriana said she could tell when anyone pronounced O’Brian with an e instead of the a. If she spent money too frivolously Eugene became upset not over extravagance but waste. It was unseemly for his wife to own twenty-eight ball gowns. “Now dear,” she’d say, “time to give your silly Celtic thrift a rest.”

  Gloriana admitted she was an unlikely candidate to have become, in what she called her frisky forties, a Communist. She liked to repeat, however, that she knew something about widows and orphans because ever since poor Eugene fell into a cement mixer while inspecting a construction site in Worcester she had had to fend for herself and her two sons. She didn’t add that the thirty-two million dollars she inherited from poor Eugene, three generations removed from the Potato Famine that had sent the first O’Brian packing, made the fending tolerable.

  “After two years,” Gloriana liked to recall, “I Flowered.” When it became likely that Prohibition would eventually be repealed, the owner of Flower Ales in Manchester, Bernard Flower, sailed to New York, where the widow O’Brian had sheltered her penury on Park Avenue, to position his English beer for conquest in the New World. The brewer picked up Gloriana at a performance of the Ziegfeld Follies where she had been dragged by a sister from Boston who wanted to do something wicked. Bernard Flower promptly forgot the first Mrs. Flower back in Manchester. Gloriana told of her initial tryst with Bernard following which, in deference to his nationality, she had said, “There now, feeling better, Mr. Flower?” Her remarriage ensued.

  Even while it was still illegal his ale was unpopular, but Bernard Flower proved to have a knack for snapping up land bargains. Soon he owned a sturdy portion of western Long Island or, as he put it, a great deal of Great Neck. After providing Gloriana with a daughter on whom she doted, the ale and land baron was thrown from his polo pony, shattering his skull, during a match against a team of Argentinians. It was thus, at the end of the Twenties and her own thirties, that twice-widowed Gloriana found herself, as she put it, abruptly de-Flowered may the dear fellow rest in peace. With a dozen more millions from English ale and Long Island real estate, plus her two O’Brian teenage males and little female Flower child, the briefly grieving Gloriana betook herself and her brood in a private railroad car across the country in the depths of the Depression to settle in the West in 1932. Having a few contacts in Santa Barbara, she gave the Eastern enclave a try but wrote her sister that she found it conversationally arid and too much like Boston without the culture that is Boston’s only excuse.

  Eschewing Beverly Hills, Gloriana was a snob to the snobs and chose Santa Monica for its coastal access. She liked proximi
ty to the motion picture industry, where she found social inspiration and concupiscent sodality. In her pantheon was only talent, but it had to be a particular talent she herself happened to appreciate. She disdained Dietrich, loved Ronald Colman, indulged Gable but wanted him to play only comedy, couldn’t stand the likable Jimmy Stewart, loathed Garbo but approved of Crawford and Stanwyck. She pitied Jack Gilbert and thought it unfair that his squeaky voice killed him in talkies. In this private aristocracy she adored George Cukor, didn’t warm to Frank Capra, loved David Selznick for his excesses, disapproved of Darryl Zanuck or at least didn’t trust him. Where Mossy was concerned Gloriana was alternately petulant and tolerant; when she entered her Red period she told friends he was her favorite fascist because he was at heart a farceur. She knew Pammy only in passing, and she didn’t think Pammy had the courage of what Gloriana referred to as her soi-disant politics. “Career, career, career,” she said. “Like all the stars, she doesn’t want to come out of the trees and risk her salary, or in Palmyra’s case the approval of her boss. Meow.”

  In lovers, Gloriana favored writers for their tormented souls, though she found young actors irresistible. Her first Hollywood conquest of consequence was Gary Cooper, who had just made the earliest film version of A Farewell to Arms. She thought him elegant, handsome beyond description and, unlike his screen persona, articulate. Her complaint was simple: “This man,” she confided to Sylvia, “has the most divine équipage I should hope to find in California but absolutely no derrière with which to push it.”

  Gloriana snapped up Poor Jim Bicker, wallowing with him in his misery, as ravenous for his rages against society as for his animal passion. The day soon came, however, when Poor Jim had the misjudgment to introduce Gloriana to an unkempt Communist professor out from CCNY, a man whose cheekbones and goatee—his only neatly groomed feature—were Lenin’s while his piercing eyes and tousled hair belonged to Trotsky, enabling him to look like both Revolutionary heroes at the same time. Gloriana swallowed him whole and joined the Party. Her sons, of course, hated Professor Bruno Leonard, but he took care to charm Gloriana’s daughter with sweets and Winnie-the-Pooh books. The professor was the guest of honor at Gloriana’s soiree and was caroming around the room from cluster to cluster.