Girl of My Dreams

by Peter Davis

  Thelma was the sweet one; Matt, like any horse trainer, had a sharp tongue and could be unexpectedly gruff, especially with humans. Matt lifted the vagrant profession of Hollywood horse trainer into one that demanded skills as exacting as those needed to train Thoroughbreds for the Kentucky Derby. Born in west Texas, named Mathilda by her parents, Matt became the partner and authority figure in Thelma’s life. Thelma and Matt were a fixture in the subset of the Hollywood social scene that featured lesbians. Parties in their Tarzana home were lively, musical, and were attended by women far weightier on the scale of motion picture prestige.

  As a star who commanded the screen, Trent was surrounded by a magnetic field even in a hospital room, but Mossy was pleased to see that Thelma herself had an appeal that would fit well in this match. A strong chin, softened by a natural smile and eager eyes reminded Mossy why he’d signed her in the first place. She had square shoulders, nice tidy breasts maybe a half-size too small, and an outdoors body, which was precisely why she made her living where she did and not in Jubilee’s dramas or comedies. An attractive girl, Mossy told himself, this may work out just fine.

  “No reason to mince words or beat around the bush,” Mossy said to his two properties, one of them still ignorant that she was about to be made adjacent to the other. Mossy immediately regretted his figures of speech but understood where they’d come from. “You two nice kids are going to be married soon. To each other.”

  Trent, who already knew his fate, hung his head in embarrassment. Thelma thought the boss must be teasing. “Mr. Zangwill,” she said, “I didn’t know you went in for practical jokes, but this is a good one. You must be feeling lots better.”

  Mossy didn’t have to say anything more. Trent’s posture told Thelma all she needed to know. When she glanced at her intended—intended, that is, by the patient in the silk bathrobe looking contented with himself—Trent was shaking his head.

  “This is silly, this is ridiculous,” Thelma complained. “Trent and I don’t even know each other and anyway people say he’s … ” She caught herself. “And you know Matt Sampson and I, we’re, uh, very devoted to each other. I can’t marry anyone.”

  “It’ll be good for both of you,” Mossy said. “I’m a happy matchmaker.” He didn’t add that he’d told Louella Parsons, who was ready to break the news in her column.

  “Isn’t there some other way, Boss?” Trent asked with a forlorn look that Mossy would never allow to be captured on camera because it was such a drastic contradiction of the swaggering he-man parts Amberlyn played.

  “Yeah, Trent, there’s always another way,” the studio chief said. Thelma looked hopefully at Mossy, who now arose from his chair. “The other way, Trent, is for me to let you be exposed as a fairy, which half the reporters in town are dying to do anyway. That slime Billy Wilkerson already ran a blind item about you, and Lolly Parsons saw you with that hangdog expression outside my office the day we sprung you from jail for picking up a fifteen-year-old and you came to my office with that cheese-ass Boy Boulton who I never want to see on my lot again.”

  Trent Amberlyn looked even more embarrassed for being described this way in front of the woman he had to regard as his fiancée.

  “All right, you want to save Trent’s career,” Thelma said, “but why me? No one cares if two women share a house, and I don’t get parts that need me to have a public boyfriend anyway, much less a”—and she spat out the word with disgust—“HUZZ-BANNED, for God’s sake.” Thelma dragged the two syllables into an alien curse.

  “I have plans for you, my dear Thelma,” Mossy said, improvising. “I’ve been thinking for some time it would be nice to bring you back over to Jubilee and put you in some parts where you can actually act instead of doing calisthenics with horses.”

  The appeal to her vanity didn’t work. “I’m happy where I am,” Thelma said, “though I wish I got half the salary other studios pay you for my services.”

  Mossy caught himself flaring up. No need for this, he quickly realized. “Listen to me,” he said calmly, “both of you. Thelma, your salary is doubled as of your wedding day. Trent, your Spanish colonial has extra rooms up on Mulholland, doesn’t it?”

  “It does,” Trent said. “But I like to keep them for … ”

  “I don’t really care what you like right now,” Mossy said, turning to Thelma. “Mulholland, my dear, faces two ways, like you two lovebirds will soon be doing. You can look out at Beverly Hills and Hollywood, or you can look over at the Valley where Tarzana is. Matt Sampson will soon have a room at Trent’s mansion, and no one will stop you from sledding down the hill to Tarzana for a little privacy now and then.”

  “This can’t happen,” Thelma said, looking for support at her fiancé, who himself saw a thin slice of possibility where he’d make common cause with his designated bride.

  “Mossy, there must be a choice besides sacking me. I quite agree with Thelma.” Trent’s six months at acting school in London had left him occasionally anglicized.

  “That’s good,” Mossy said. “I’m glad to see the two of you agreeing. It’ll help your relationship, just the way it does for any of us happily married Americans.”

  Mossy stepped between his two pieces of property and held each of their hands. “It happens,” he said, “I’ve told Louella Parsons about your engagement. She’s holding the news till I release it. You’ll be married in my garden. Now go have a drink with each other, make your wedding lists. Young Jant will spruce up your bio’s. Meeting over.”

  Appropriately, especially for Hollywood, the wedding was in June. The nuptials were celebrated under a spreading live oak in Mossy’s garden. Mossy himself was safely away at Lake Arrowhead for the weekend, immune to any slipups that might mar the occasion he had dictated to the reluctant bride and groom.

  There were no slipups. Photoplay had the exclusive on the wedding and sent a photographer and writer who covered the ceremony well enough while cordially hating one another. The reporter was shy and liked to speak softly to her subjects. The photographer barged his bulky six-six frame into every conversation, flash-bulbing away any possibility of spontaneity or intimacy. Nor did he recognize well-known personalities. “Say fellow,” he said to the especially handsome best man who was pouring Champagne for guests before the ceremony, “mind telling me your moniker?”

  “Randolph Scott,” said the amused pal of Trent’s.

  He was a good best man, a dashing romantic actor who would look respectable in Photoplay. With possibly the strongest chin and most chiseled features in town, Randolph Scott was more handsome than John Wayne, though he didn’t have the Duke’s disdainful squint or cocky swagger. Randy’s own housemate, Cary Grant, whose star was just beginning to rise, prudently skipped the wedding. Thelma’s Matt Sampson was at first indignant, threatening a boycott, but Thelma finally convinced her to be maid of honor.

  When she heard that Photoplay would be in attendance, Louella Parsons ran off in a huff to Palm Springs for the weekend with the Louis B. Mayers. She had broken the original story, improvised to her in Mossy’s office the day he (sort of) collapsed, but he wanted the wedding to be a pictorial event in the premier fan magazine. Mossy promised Louella an exclusive interview as soon as the newlyweds returned from their honeymoon, for which he had paid all expenses, in Acapulco.

  Many of the three dozen guests were friends of Trent’s, hangers-on along with his agents and their wives. Jubilee’s publicity head attended, Stanny Poule, who kept revising my proffered Amberlyn bio to make it clear this man-about-town was the catch of the decade for Thelma Thacker. Stanny was the former newsman from St. Louis who rued the day he’d signed on to become a pale imitation of Hans Christian Andersen in Hollywood. “At least this time,” he muttered to me, “we really do have a fairy tale.”

  Boy Boulton hovered on the edge of the small crowd, rigid with unaccustomed decorum, afraid to indulge his trademark cackles, knowing the owner of the garden would have him executed if he were noticed by Photoplay or gave
offense to anyone. I did hear him snicker to a friend about a slender young man who had just offered a platter of crab louie, “No use for the kid’s crabs, but I’d plonk his derrière anytime.”

  One guest at the wedding happened to know both bride and groom. He was a stately, handsome black man, a consummate actor named Burle Kince who did an Othello in San Diego in 1930, unforgettable to all who saw it. Thelma, then an aspiring stage actress, was Desdemona. Trent came down with Boy Boulton to see the performance and was effusive backstage. (So effusive about Burle Kince he met no other members of the cast, neither Iago, who was played by the emerging Franchot Tone, nor his own future wife, Thelma herself.) Trent told Burle Kince he had to come to Hollywood, had to come to the studio—Trent was then at Fox—to make his mark in movies. Trent was being sweetly naïve. Kince came up to Fox and was offered nothing but servant and handyman roles, which he refused to play. He got one part as a lacrosse player (there were no black lacrosse players but it didn’t matter), another as an attendant in a gas station, and then returned to the theater, where he had only a few more roles before becoming an acting teacher at San Diego State. At the wedding he was as striking as Randolph Scott. No one in Hollywood ever saw Burle Kince again.

  Thelma’s small support group was fierce. Her woman friends wanted to make sure she’d be well-treated and not simply displayed as a mannequin for a star who needed what one of them referred to as a cunty cover. The only toast at the wedding, given just before the ceremony, was by a tall willowy writer from Toronto, Charlotte Gelfano. She had graduated from title-writing for silents to slick dramas in the talkie era. They were marketed as women’s movies, disdained as soap operas by male critics, but they had recognizable women in them facing realistic crises. “Raise a glass,” Charlotte Gelfano said, “to a fine woman and, from what I can see, a good man. I’ve known Thelma five years, and as good an actress as she is, she’s an even better friend because her greatest talent is listening. My fondest wish for this union, this surprising but hopeful union, is that you, Trent, will prove as adept at listening as Thelma. Then your worries will be temporary and your pleasures lasting. To Thelma and Trent.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Randolph Scott, “and listen, listen.”

  The unlikely couple stood next to the justice of peace under the live oak, while the guests sat in a semicircle in folding chairs. Thelma held a bouquet of flocon de neige roses—whiter than snow, really, whiter than white—provided her by Mossy’s gardening wizard, Obie Joyful. Obie himself, wearing his customary green leather jacket, stood at the edge of the wedding party, looking as pleased as if he’d just stumbled upon woodland nymphs in his bower. When the justice, a bewhiskered gentleman of the old school, came to the part where the groom said, “I, Trent, take thee, Thelma,” for some reason he couldn’t express, Trent knelt. Perhaps he had done this in a movie. Touched by the gesture and thinking well, that’s what you do, Thelma did the same. Obie Joyful put two fingers in his mouth and piped out a soft whistle. Cued, the wedding guests sucked in their collective breaths and found themselves clapping. The nuptials finished quickly.

  The half-minute kiss at the end of the ceremony was duly captured from several angles by the Photoplay photographer, who sneered as he shot. He cracked to Trent’s agent that this would surely be the first and last time this couple ever touched each other. Champagne flowed for an obligatory hour, in the service of form and Photoplay, before the guests tired of felicitations and movie chat and scattered, including me. The real reception was at Trent’s Mulholland mansion, where a party lasted, according to my pleased informants who eventually included Thelma herself, for a good six hours. Boy Boulton, released from his manacles of public behavior in Mossy’s garden, became a kind of emcee as the celebration—minus Randolph Scott, minus the agents and their wives, but plus several more of Thelma’s friends—resounded through Trent’s many rooms. A half dozen young men of Hollywood, considered too louche, or too flaming, to be invited to the nuptials themselves, joined the festivities. “Pansies arise,” Boy Boulton announced as he stood under the arch that led to the two-story living room in Trent’s Spanish colonial, “you have nothing to lose but your brains.”

  “Then I have nothing to lose anyway,” said a tattooed motorcyclist.

  “Oh Grandma, what tight pants you have,” said Boy Boulton.

  Thelma poured herself a straight Scotch. She expected everyone, including Matt Sampson, to be gone soon. Then she and Trent would sit down and devise the plan for how to live together for the shortest possible time. She watched a pair of women who had played a mother and daughter in her last Western dancing together, shortly joined by two male couples. She saw a romp developing, and she wasn’t thrilled. She felt like a stranger among the men who began dancing to a Rudy Vallee record. Vagabond lovers. “Don’t you hate queers?” Matt whispered to her as she poured her own drink, a tumbler of bourbon. “Congratulations, baby,” Matt said as she and Thelma clinked glasses.

  To my naïve surprise when the evening was described to me, Tutor Beedleman bounced in, Jubilee’s cheery writer who managed to stay on the right side of Mossy even on bad days. He made a courtly gesture toward Trent and went to greet Thelma. “Hello, I’m Shirley Temple’s mother,” Tutor said, breaking whatever ice had accumulated between the men and women in the room. “So happy to see our sisters well represented,” he went on, kissing Thelma on the cheek. “Congratulations to the blushing bride. You’re getting an ace of hearts in every way.” Thelma smiled, and Tutor bowed low before he crossed to the other side of the room where the men and drinks were.

  Following the proclamation of their banns in Mossy’s hospital room at Cedars, the bride and groom had met only once more before the wedding itself. Deciding they needed to be seen in public, they swept into the Brown Derby for lunch one day. Conversation didn’t come easy. They fell back on professional comparisons of actors and directors, but they scarcely knew any in common. It was like a blind date that wasn’t going too well. Trent gallantly asked what Thelma would like to have in the house for breakfast. This suddenly depressed Thelma, and she could barely say she didn’t care before she began to cry. When Trent patted her elbow and thoughtfully produced a monogrammed handkerchief, she was touched enough to put her hand on his.

  After lunch they went across the street to Laikin’s Jewelry store in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. They quickly picked out a wedding ring for Thelma, a simple gold band, and were on the point of leaving, Max Laikin having already had his picture taken with the most talked about affianced couple in town, when Thelma was struck by an idea. “Hey Sweetie,” she said bravely, “what about an engagement ring?” The jeweler was overjoyed as he quickly led them to the gemstone case. When he asked what she had in mind, Thelma said, “Something really flashy.” She laughed. Trent frowned, but then he laughed too. He was suddenly both resentful and proud. Could this woman be taking him?—a thought immediately followed by his realization that he was finally doing something in real life that the hearty males he played in movies did. His betrothed selected a diamond the size of a grape ringed by a quincunx of emeralds, and they waltzed out of Laikin’s with Trent gratefully poorer by twelve thousand dollars.

  The next time they saw each other was in Mossy’s garden, their wedding a semipublic event, and now in Trent’s house they were supposed to be alone together, in private Thelma had thought, only they were not. Trent was sipping Champagne with Boy Boulton and Tutor and another man Thelma recognized as a slick character actor, often a gambler or thug, in crime films. A foggy-voiced lounge singer was with them. Other men had begun to leave the dance floor and wander elsewhere in the big house.

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” Thelma said. She drank quickly, poured herself another Scotch, and drank that too.

  “I do,” said Matt, and she guided Thelma to the stairs. Trent, who had one arm around Boy Boulton and was ruffling the hair of the slick racketeer with the other, let go of Boy and raised a glass to his wife as he said, “Turn
right at the top, lovey, I think you’ll like the second room on the left.”

  Thelma was warmer after the Scotches, but she still felt a stranger. She liked the chintz on the bed, two Swedish-looking chairs, curtains with nymphs and shepherds on them, windows overlooking the Valley. She drifted to the window in search of anything familiar, but Tarzana was too far to the west.

  “We christen this bed,” Matt said.

  “Matt,” Thelma started to laugh, “This is my wedding night. I don’t even—”

  “I said now,” Matt said.

  Downstairs, the music was louder, jazzy, and the dancing faster, almost frenzied. Three couples and a single—Boy Boulton—were whirling around the floor. The men paused only to drink, and a few of them used straws poking at hand mirrors; cocaine had recently blazed its powdery trail to Hollywood. Trent had gone outside with someone.

  By the time Thelma and Matt descended the stairs, few were dancing. The men were mostly on the floor. The lounge singer and the movie thug were entangled with Boy Boulton, and Trent joined them when he came inside with the motorcyclist. The mother and daughter from the cowboy film, hardy frontier survivors of an Indian raid, were spread-eagled on a couch the size of a small boat and covered in mink. Thelma recognized Fernald Gespours, from eastern wealth, on top of Tutor Beedleman on a Persian carpet. “A tight little squadron of lesbos,” Matt said as she and Thelma dove toward the mink couch. People were laughing. Legs and thighs everywhere. Men caressing and drilling, women tonguing and caressing. The air was moist enough to have signaled rain.