by Peter Davis
Lighting a candle for her parents in the Episcopal Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill, Pammy was recognized for the only time. A fashionably dressed woman in a dark gauzy veil of her own said to Pammy in a French accent, “Alors, Mam’sell Millevoix, I heard you were in town. Please be careful. Both sides are wrong, as always.”
Our talk spun through the universe. Doctors in Europe and the United States. The moral superiority and insufferability of vegetarians. Politics, of course: what you could have in a socialist state, what you’d give up. Hitler, Stalin, FDR. How Millie called the Nazis Nasties. The progress of the strike. Longshoremen were lucky to see $40 a week; Pammy made over a hundred times more. What kind of society organizes itself that way? Love: the love of the ethereal, such as God or an idea, love in friendship, love between a man and woman, between women, between men, the love of parent for child, the love of money and power and whether that was a base form of love, not really love at all, or simply, in the Freudian sense, a substitution for other forms of love that had been withheld. Millie: should she be encouraged to go into show business as she already wanted to do, or forbidden and made to go straight? George Sand, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Huxley, Gertrude Stein, Katherine Mansfield. She’d had dinner with Malraux in Paris; he’d invited her to go to Indochina but she hadn’t. Writing versus painting versus composing. Everything but Mossy and the future; both of us stayed scrupulously away from those twin subjects that were both unrelated and related.
The night before the memorial parade, Sunday night, was sad in our unspoken knowledge we’d soon not be alone. Our lovemaking was careful, in some way valedictory. I didn’t fall asleep though I heard her breathing softly, like a child. Once, also like a child, she whimpered. She stopped before I could put my arm around her.
In the morning at ILA headquarters, a long line of men and women, many with small children clinging to them, filed past the two coffins, both open. Many made the sign of the cross as they looked at the waxy, still faces in the coffins. Pammy did not. Her bearing was stately, public as she nodded at the figures in the caskets, her private communion with the labor martyrs. I felt like her consort. As they passed their dead comrades, a number of the ILA men raised one fist in a workers’ salute. Many left small bunches of flowers. Uniformed sentries guarded the coffin of Howard Sperry, who was a World War veteran.
The coffins were carried down the stairway and placed on flatbed trucks. Three additional trucks followed bearing flowers. The dockworkers’ own union band began the measured cadence of Beethoven’s funeral march, not so much played as moaned.
As we formed up for the march, Mike Quin accompanied Pammy and me. He was turning the pages of the San Francisco Examiner, the Hearst paper that union members had more or less been forbidden to read. Quin was snickering. “Look at this, the dame’s on some other planet, isn’t she?” he said as he showed us what he meant. The long arm of Hollywood had reached up the coast. Louella Parsons was clucking at Pammy for her presence in San Francisco as much as for her absence from Jubilee: “The film colony’s small but arrogant contingent at the Bay Area’s criminal dock strike ought to have faces as red as their politics. Unfortunately, they’re defiant and ungrateful for the fact they live in the greatest country in the world. Miss Millevoix—or should I call her Comrade?—remains on suspension at Jubilee, which is right where she belongs. Kudos to the execs on the Zangwill lot.” Pammy’s face was stony. “Kudos wrapped in dollars,” she said.
I have never to this day seen anything like the funeral procession. The trucks moved slowly out onto San Francisco’s main artery, Market Street. Forty thousand marchers followed. People moved in such dignified order it was as if lava were flowing and the wide boulevard were a canyon. No shouting, no horns blaring. We were in the presence of a booming silence. Many more thousands of spectators lined the sidewalks, but they weren’t making noise either. “In life,” Mike Quin murmured to Pammy and me, “Nick Bordoise and Howard Sperry wouldn’t have been given a second glance on the sidewalks of San Francisco, but in death they’re borne the length of Market Street in a reverent procession that would have been inconceivable to either of them.” Then Mike himself was silent. I began to hear, as the march progressed, a pitch arising from the throng that reminded me of a wordless hymn, without octave or tone, that was almost like humming.
“Now we know the sound,” Mike Quin said, “of one hand clapping.”
Pammy had been asked if she’d like to ride with the widows. She said this was their day, not hers, and she’d stay with the union members. Few marchers paid any attention to her. When I asked Quin about the absence of police and the regulation of the many thousands on the street and sidewalks by a few hundred dockworkers with no experience in traffic or crowd control, he looked at me as if I were a child. “Skinny,” he said, reverting to my earlier nickname, “the police aren’t here because the longshoremen are policing themselves and everyone else. If any police were around you’d need a whole other police force to police them. Labor is burying its own today.”
We strode up Market Street a few more blocks before Quin told me a general strike was in the air. Bridges and the other union leaders planned a strike that would immobilize all workers and businesses in San Francisco and Oakland. I thought this was a crazy, quixotic idea that had no chance. Couldn’t these fools see defeat when it was right in front of them, lying in the caskets they marched behind? The port would now be open to all ships; the longshoremen and seamen would have no choice but to return to work or lose their jobs for good. Unemployed strong-bodied men were about two dollars a dozen and easy to find in the midst of the Depression. “No,” Mike Quin said, “this parade is an entreaty, silently delivered, silently received. The long quiet march confirms the solid strength of the unions. The labor movement is resolved now, and resolve leads to resolution.” He walked on ahead to speak to an officer of the Teamsters.
By the time Pammy and I returned to the Fairmont Hotel, the incongruity of its juxtaposition with where we had been and what we had seen left both of us almost without air in our lungs. We sat in her suite with our thoughts, saying nothing, looking at each other, at the furniture, out the window. Pammy closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair. Whatever she was thinking, I was thinking about loss. The strike was lost. With the National Guard patrolling the waterfront alongside the police, it was clear the shipowners and dockowners—capital, in other words—had won. The woman across from me, the woman I loved, would go back to her own life the next day as a mother and a star, and she’d be lost to me as well. Absent without leave, I’d probably lose my job too. After a long while, still wordless, I got up and went out. I started to take a walk and then realized I had no energy, so I sat in the park a block from the Fairmont. I don’t know how long I stayed there, ruminating on the bleakness of my future, and San Francisco’s, and the labor movement’s, when a woman in black, so shrouded and veiled she had to have come from a funeral herself if she wasn’t hiding from the law, sat down beside me. Now what? I thought with annoyance.
“Why did you leave me?” a voice came from under the veil. “You left me all alone up there. Please don’t leave me.”
“Jesus,” I said, turning to the veil, “I had no idea it was you.”
“Let’s have dinner in the room tonight,” she said.
We walked a little, aimlessly following California Street a few blocks, then turning back to the hotel. For the first time, I felt I could have held Pammy’s hand in public, but I did not. I ordered room service, and each of us picked at our food.
She fell asleep before I did. Though I scarcely knew it at the time, our lovemaking was that of an old married couple—this is what she wants, this is what he likes—each of us pleasing the other, then ourselves. I watched her sleep with the moon both lighting and shadowing her features. It was impossible to stop my mind from racing ahead. How would being back home change what was going on here? Would she still want me at all? What actually was going on here? Could I believe in it? How wo
uld we get back to Los Angeles in the morning? She whimpered once, as she had the night before, and I wanted to hold her and didn’t want to wake her, so I did nothing. She whimpered again but stopped immediately. I saw the sky begin to lighten before I fell asleep. I dreamed of steak tartare, which gave me indigestion. When I finally awoke she was gone.
The note was on Fairmont stationery. Where had she found the six lilies it was clipped to? “I’m off, Sweet O,” the note read. “If you’ll pardon my quoting myself, I still can’t find the good in goodbye. You are to me what spring showers are to the hungry earth, bringing up blossoms in all kinds of unplanned spaces. Be patient, my cherished. Love all ways, Your PM.”
Nils Maynard, upstaging Largo Buchalter this time, had sent his plane for her. She was probably back in Los Angeles before I’d even had breakfast. As I left the city myself, the headline on the newspaper at the train station said, “Red Army Marches on San Francisco.”
33
Bumblebee
Pammy was welcomed home venomously in Louella’s column: “Good for Mossy Zangwill over at Jubilee if he refuses to reinstate the oh-so-holier-than-thou Palmyra Millevoix who is importing not merely her European elegance but also an alien ideology. Radio stations should stop playing her songs the way Zangwill, once her champion and then some, has suspended her from the picture she walked out on. My spies tell me he is threatening to cancel her contract. If she doesn’t mend her ways, and fast, this non-citizen should be deported, and faster.”
But Louella didn’t run Jubilee. To my surprise Pammy plunged back into work at the studio, where Mossy immediately voided her suspension. He needed her; it was that simple. When I asked her why she was returning to the studio she said, “What good am I on the outside?” To the studio it was as if she’d had a fever that had receded and her temperature was now normal again. Mossy assured Pammy that the Mexican seamstresses had been given fifty percent raises with time and a half for overtime; he claimed he hadn’t known how little they were being paid before.
Nils Maynard had replaced Wick Fairless, the director Pammy hated, with Nils Maynard, and a quick rewrite of the script had given her a far stronger character. Love Is for Strangers now had Pammy leaving her unfaithful husband and subsequently taking up with a horse breeder, who in the earlier version had been only a friend of the philandering husband’s. Pammy’s character had a baby by the ne’er-do-well husband, causing her mother, played by Ethel Barrymore at her haughtiest, to refuse to see her grandchild and break off all contact with her daughter. Things went swiftly on the set, Pammy’s favorite, Stage Eight, which, she maintained, had the best acoustics on the lot.
I myself was put on the rewrite of a dud called Firebrand, their way of letting me know I was on probation. A young couple has bought their first home—the husband a fireman, the wife a bookkeeper in a clothing store. You know the rest: one evening the owner of the store, facing bankruptcy and assuming everyone has gone home, starts a fire to burn the store down so he can collect the insurance. The conscientious wife is still in the store going over sales records. By the time the fire trucks arrive the place is ablaze. The fireman fails to save his wife but does find evidence of arson. Brokenhearted, he tells the police who take forever to trace the fire to the owner. Meanwhile, the insurance company is tracking down all suspects and their investigator is a woman who, of course, falls for the fireman in his grief. Makes friends with his two adorable motherless youngsters. Nothing here but soapsuds, yet it was my back-in-the-fold assignment, and my fingers flew at the keys of my Royal, famished crows pecking for corn. The main change I made was to have the woman investigator be the daughter of the guilty store owner, which meant that eventually she’d have to choose between loyalty to her father and to the fireman who wants revenge. I was briskly replaced by the reliably arch Tutor Beedleman who didn’t care about the romance but spruced up the plot so that the fireman had a criminal record of his own, a shady past he was trying to escape. And so on.
Besides being the ultimate company towns, Hollywood and Washington have one further attribute in common that keeps everyone in either place from relaxing. They’re always trying to figure out what the rest of the country wants. More than anything else, it was the worry about whether his hunches would find audiences that kept Mossy as anti-union as he was. He wanted everyone on the lot to have the same vision he did: lines around the block in Schenectady. That left no time for labor disputes.
But Pammy had taken her secular vows, and San Francisco only confirmed them. Back at work on a picture, she hadn’t forgotten the principles behind the dockworkers’ strike. Anyone who was not an owner was by definition being exploited, from which it followed that owners were exploiters. Even if Mossy didn’t entirely own Jubilee because of his need for the New York bankers, he was New York’s West Coast proconsul and held a major portion of Jubilee stock. What Pammy wanted was to make Jubilee Pictures a model for the rest of Hollywood, a studio fully organized by unions.
She was hardly alone. Each craft had representatives who wanted the picture business to be part of the labor movement. Yeatsman a bit reluctantly led the writers—with the Screen Writers Guild still in its infancy, Mossy predictably supported their company union rivals, the Screen Playwrights. For all his bluster, Largo Buchalter was driving the interested directors. Set designers and decorators were restless. Cameramen were grumbling about overtime. Pammy was simply the most visible among the actors favoring a union. Like her sister Elise among the decorators, Pammy wanted to get all the crafts together, and after we returned from San Francisco she asked me who she ought to speak to among the carpenters.
To my eternal shame, I told her I’d heard that Hop Daigle, the jelly-eyed carpenter, had emerged as the leader among the set builders. She and Yeatsman had a private meeting with Daigle off the lot. They decided to hold a rally outside the Jubilee gates and announce plans to organize the studio. Then they had a second meeting with craft representatives—film editors, sound engineers, makeup artists, and stuntmen.
The day after the second meeting Willie Bioff, the labor fixer—racketeer, go-between, shakedown artist, they all fit—came to see Mossy again with, of course, Hop Daigle. I had no idea. When Elena Frye told me about this later, I knew I shouldered lasting responsibility and would never know how much. Daigle, whose jelly eye had turned whitish according to Elena, told them of the plans to organize Jubilee as essentially a union shop with many guilds representing the various crafts. Rumblings at the other studios were similar. It was primitive, hardly a threat to capitalist enterprise, nothing like the broad-based unions that were out to organize entire industries. But it was enough to make the Hollywood titans first shudder and then become furious. The rumor at Fox was that Darryl Zanuck threatened to mount a machine gun on a parapet above the studio gates and have anyone mowed down who marched outside with a picket sign.
Up north, Harry Bridges’s creed was to find out what the rank and file, as he always called longshoremen, wanted to do and then help them do it, from the bottom up. Willie Bioff, as he’d done when Jubilee’s sets were being trashed, would find out how much he could extort from the bosses, then pass as little of the boodle as possible to the workers, from the top down, keeping the rest for himself and his mob handlers. I doubt Bridges and Bioff ever met, but if they did they couldn’t have understood one another’s language. Elena Frye told me that Willie Bioff, smiling and joking throughout the meeting, had started at a hundred thousand dollars with Mossy, promising labor peace if his price was met, and had settled for thirty-five. Hop Daigle nodded his agreement, the jellied eye gone milky for the occasion, and Mossy quickly looked away.
The night before the rally at Jubilee I went to dinner at Pammy’s house. Millie at last had a real dog, which she’d delightedly named Cordell. Cordell was beloved in different ways by each of his mistresses—Millie, Costanza, and Pammy. Millie asked me if I could write a screamplay about her and Cordell. The puppy, an Airedale terrier, could still barely stand so Millie carried
it. She’d taken the name from her mother’s jingle on the secretary of state, who the seven-year-old Millie hadn’t heard of. She seldom sang it the same way twice. “I’m in love with Cordell Hull, He treats me nice though he’s awfully dull.” Sometimes, trying out a new word, Millie would do the second line as “But I have to admit he’s indubitably dull,” and in an irritable mood she’d sing, “When he’s mean I want to bash his skull.” Cordell the dog, unlike his stolid namesake, was as lively and jumpy as his puppy legs would let him be, but when he was swooped into Millie’s arms he subsided into a quick cuddle.
Pammy and I scarcely had eye contact at dinner. In the way a precocious child can dominate an occasion, the conversation wound around Millie, Cordell, her school, or something she hoped to do. The three of us chewed our lamb chops in unison, each new subject announced by Millie, and we were not a family.
Before Costanza took her upstairs, Millie asked me for a story. I told her that in my story there would be a fairy godmother and a mean mother. “Oh good,” she said, “a really mean mother.” I set off, not knowing where I was headed, and had looked away from Millie to her mother when Millie asked me to describe the fairy godmother. “She was so pretty,” I said, “that she looked like a sunny morning in a golden meadow. She had gossamer eyebrows below her wide forehead lined with all the thinking she did, and the eyebrows slanted down a little on the sides giving her hazel eyes perhaps a tiny glimmer of sadness, but it was only the sadness that there were too many more children to help than she had time to get to, so whenever she helped a child her eyes became a little less sad. At the tip of her nose her nostrils widened slightly giving her the look of wanting something she didn’t quite have, or once had but didn’t have anymore.”