Girl of My Dreams

by Peter Davis

  “A fairy godfather, right?” said Millie. “That’s what she wanted.” “Maybe,” I said, “but maybe it was only she still had so much to do. Her smile was the other thing children always noticed because it was a little one-sided on the left where her lips turned up more than on the right. And again, this was because she hadn’t quite helped enough children yet and when she finally finished helping all the children who needed her she was going to have a full smile on both sides of her mouth.”

  “Uncle Owen, what’s gossamer eyebrows?”

  “Oh, thin wispy little things, eyebrows you almost couldn’t see because they were honey-colored and blended right in with her thoughtful forehead. Anyway, here’s what happened—there was a little girl who had the meanest mother in the world.” “That’s impossible,” Millie interrupted, warming to the tale, “my mother is the meanest mother because she won’t let me stay up late and she spends too much time at the studio and isn’t home for dinner enough and sometimes she stays away almost a week in San Francisco.” “Well, okay, that’s pretty mean, but this mother was even named Meanie. Mrs. Meanie. The mean thing she did one night was to not let her daughter Lily have dessert, no dessert at all even though Lily had cleaned her plate, Brussels sprouts and bony fish which she hated, but Mrs. Meanie had promised Lily a special treat for dessert if she finished everything on her plate.”

  “Wait a minute, Lily is her name?” Millie said. “Why not Barbara or Genevieve?”

  “She looked a little like you so her name sounds like yours, but she had an even meaner mother. Listen to what Mrs. Meanie did to Lily when Lily thought she was about to get dessert. Mrs. Meanie tied her daughter to a chair in the kitchen while she went and got ice cream, peppermint stick ice cream which was her daughter Lily’s favorite.”—“It’s my favorite too Uncle Owen and you know it!” Millie squealed.—“But it was Lily’s favorite and she loved chocolate cake with it, which Mrs. Meanie had baked specially because just the smell of it would drive Lily crazy.”

  “So she wasn’t that mean after all. She gave Lily the dessert?”

  “Of course not. Mrs. Meanie brought out the chocolate cake and peppermint stick ice cream and then she, Mrs. Meanie, proceeded to eat it very slowly, spoonful by delicious spoonful, right in front of Lily who was tied up begging for a bite. ‘Please, please!’ Lily said, ‘just one little bite of the cake and ice cream.’ But Mrs. Meanie looked at her and said so slowly that the word lasted a long time, ‘Noooooooooooo.’ Lily cried and was put to bed with no dessert, and that’s when the fairy godmother with the gossamer eyebrows and ever so slightly one-sided smile came in her window carrying a huge slice of chocolate cake and four scoops of peppermint ice cream.”

  “Please,” Pammy said, “could we hold it to two?” “No!” Millie said, “I want Lily to have four!” “Yes,” I said, “it was four scoops because she had to have extra scoops to make up for all the times her mean mother Mrs. Meanie hadn’t allowed her to eat any dessert at all. Her fairy godmother promised she’d be back whenever her mean mother was at her meanest. So Lily went to bed happy and slept soundly with the most disobediently adventurous dreams.”

  Millie gave me a first hug. I glimpsed the future.

  When she had kissed Millie good night, Pammy told me about Mossy’s promise that the studio seamstresses would get fifty percent raises. “I congratulated one of them who brought a gown to my bungalow. She said the raises were twenty percent and not a penny extra for overtime. Bâtard! Power, power, power is all he craves! Everything else, everyone else, is just useful. Power, that’s the woman he loves.”

  Her face was like iron. I wondered if you could take a picture of such a face, of that mood.

  I had never seen her so beautiful as when she gazed at Millie, nor so afflicted as when she described Mossy and the seamstresses. In San Francisco she had been in a rage at injustice; now the grievance was intensified by betrayal and lying. And by its source. But then the anger left her as suddenly as it had arrived and she looked, simply and guilelessly, as Mike Quin had described the marchers on Market Street, resolved. “It’s done,” she said, “or will be shortly.”

  It was time for me to go, past time. “Good luck tomorrow,” I said, and she said I should come to her bungalow after the rally so we could make plans for the weekend. “You can tell by the hug from my little seductress that she wants you at Red Woods too, okay?” As I was leaving, kissless, almost out the door, she said, “Now give me, sweet Ownie, the TK.” “TK?” I asked. “You know,” she said, “the tooth kiss we accidentally had in my bungalow at the studio that first day.”

  First day? I thought driving home. She remembered. Touching. Yet how many men has Millie called Uncle? Not only wouldn’t I ask, I didn’t want to know. I’m here now, I told myself, and I’ll stay here inside this enchantment until the weekend or the end of time, whichever comes first.

  What came first was the end of time.

  Word was passed at the studio that there would be an important labor rally at noon just outside the Jubilee lot. Someone had called the press, and since a movie star was promised, a couple of newsreel cameras were there. The carpenters quickly set up a makeshift platform—nothing more than a few sawhorses with some two-by-fours and sheets of plywood—on the public property side of the imposing wrought-iron studio gates that sported the J U B I L E E lettering sculpted into the iron. The gates were flanked by tall plaster pillars that curved above the wrought iron to form an arch. L’Arc de Triomphe du Jubilee, the writers called it when they were sure no spy was in earshot. The sound men had supplied an old-fashioned microphone, giving the occasion the look of a candidate’s campaign during the World War. Elise Millevoix had her set decorators hide the sawhorses with patriotic bunting and, because it was a blazing day, they added a little canopy over the platform.

  I’ve never been a good crowd estimator but it was busy out there. By the time the interested union advocates showed up, a group enlarged by Jubilee employees who didn’t want commissary food and were filing out to local bars and burger joints, there must have been more than two hundred of us. A number of passersby attached themselves to the gathering. I stood near the front, as expectant as everyone else.

  The rally began with a carpenter—not Hop Daigle, who was well back in the crowd—saying a crook was trying to buy off his men but it wasn’t going to work this time. The next speaker, a sound engineer, said the primitive microphone had been used in a movie about Teddy Roosevelt and that TR would be proud of citizens standing up for their rights. He was heckled by a young man who looked like the body builders at Muscle Beach. This fellow, surrounded by friends who looked just like him—tan, brawny, half-brained—shouted that the speaker ought to shut up and be grateful he had a job in hard times. Yeatsman followed the sound engineer, and now the Muscle Beach contingent became rowdy and disruptive. Yeatsman tried to say that all he wanted was free speech, free exchanges of opinion, and the free rights of working people to assemble and decide what to charge for their labor. By the time he said that this was happening not only all over the country but around the world, the rowdies were drowning him out. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he shouted, “we have some stooges here who have been sent to prevent us from having a peaceful meeting.” When the newsreel cameras swung around to focus on the Muscle Beach guys, they quieted, and Yeatsman introduced Pammy.

  Still in the evening gown she was wearing on the set that day, Pammy was helped onto the platform by Nils Maynard, who had come over from Stage Eight with her. “When I’m in front of a crowd,” she began, “most of the time I prefer to sing.”

  “Please sing!” yelled a number of Jubilee people who knew and loved her. “Sing, Pammy, sing!” Most studio employees are ardent fans well before they’re aware of labor complaints, even their own.

  Pammy smiled her biggest smile, with even the side of her mouth that usually didn’t grin widening in gratitude and, I thought, joy. “Yes sure, why don’t we all sing every problem away,” she said, mocking her tr
ademark invitation. She shook her head. “I wish I could just sing, but today all of us have to declare very clearly something very important and serious to our great studio.”

  But the Muscle Beach rowdies took up the chant: “Sing, Pammy, sing!” Panning around to them, the newsreel cameras again silenced them.

  “Some of us,” Pammy went on, raising her voice, “are paid very well for what we do. That’s undeniable. But many, many more are paid next to nothing. The seamstresses who sewed the evening gown I’m wearing in a movie that millions of people will pay to see, we hope”—she didn’t pause for the laugh she got—“those women work up to twelve hours a day and earn less than thirty dollars a week. If we care about our work we can also care about our fellow workers and our mutual need to win the right to negotiate the terms of our employment. We all want to make pictures, and we want to make them for Jubilee. The time has come for us to raise our voices together, not in song but nevertheless in unison, to support union bargaining rights. These are the rights of all labor. What we must do now—”

  She paused, and I saw her raise her arm to flick an insect off her forehead. I thought she was groping for the right word. But then I saw the insect was large enough to be a bee, and I hoped she hadn’t been stung. The next instant I saw it must have been a bumblebee, huge. The instant after that she was down flat on the platform. I hadn’t heard the shot.

  By the time I leaped onto the platform Nils and Yeatsman, Elise and others were huddled over her. Someone produced a white hand towel, and the little jet from Pammy’s forehead stained the towel blood bright, bright as life. Her eyes were open, staring at nothing, and after a few gasps, gulps for air, there was only her face, breathless, voiceless. Nils told me later I yelled at him, “Make it unhappen you son of a bitch, you’re a fucking magician!” But all I remember is seeing what I saw and wanting a film to be running in reverse—the blood pouring back down into her forehead, the rest of us springing backward off the platform landing on our feet, her standing up as if pulled on puppet strings, the bumblebee flying away, and her finishing her sentence—“What we must do now is organize and confront Jubilee where the studio can feel it, in the cash register.”

  I see this again and again, a strip of film running backward to make the scene, the unthinkable, not occur. Go on, Nils, you sleight-of-hander, do it, transfuse her, you can do anything, you bleed for her, you’re a bleeder anyway and a survivor, go ahead, you bleed. Please. All of us on the platform huddle in a circle forming an umbrella over her. We pull our heads away, no longer covering, smothering her, and she unfalls—she rises—as we resume our spots in the audience. Sometimes the bee flies off from that curved marvel of a forehead that was always a little worried, and she finishes speaking, in Swedish because it’s English going through the Moviola backward, with its Scandinavian glottals and oomphs. Then she sings and I hear the song forward, “Oh, you can’t scare me I’m stickin’ to the union, I’m stickin’ to the union … till the day I.”

  A blur. The screaming, men and women running, studio guards taking charge or trying to, pandemonium. Elise and I staying on the platform on either side of her. Inert Pammy. Sirens.

  By the time the police arrived there was nothing much for them to do. They asked questions but there were no answers. Elise was about to go off in the ambulance with Pammy when my mind began to function. I said I’d call the house. Elise said Millie had to be gotten away before the hordes arrived. “We’ll go see her later together,” Elise said.

  Inside the studio I found a phone. When Costanza answered at Pammy’s house I was wheezing so hard I couldn’t catch my breath enough to push out words. She hung up, and I fainted. I must have made a loud noise as I dropped because the next thing I knew Comfort O’Hollie was bringing me around with smelling salts. I heard her say to someone, “Our Pammy has fallen?” That brought me back to what was going on, and I realized I must have run to the writers building. “You’ve only been seconds out, poor dear,” Comfort said. “Can you speak?”

  I could. The wheezing had stopped. Comfort held my trembling hand as I called the house again. I told Costanza what had happened. Before she had a chance to moan I said she had to take Millie out of there, out to Red Woods where she’d have to play games with her and read and listen to records until I could get there with Elise. I said I’d send a studio car to take them. Costanza said she couldn’t tell Millie, and I said she shouldn’t try. All she had to do was keep Millie away from outsiders, from newspapers and above all from radios. “Hide every radio in the house at Red Woods. Tell Millie her mother is on location.”

  The Jubilee lot was in an uproar. Men and women who barely knew one another wept in each other’s arms. Someone held a spontaneous prayer service in the commissary. The police demanded that no one leave Jubilee until they completed their preliminary investigation. They questioned everyone, and everyone knew nothing.

  Theories shot around like electrons. A plainclothesman from the Los Angeles Police Department’s infamous Red Squad had done it. A rejected lover had hired a hit man. The twin to that story was a jealous actress had wanted a bigger star eliminated. Willie Bioff could have set it up with the Muscle Beach hecklers because he had promised Mossy labor peace. Hop Daigle fired the shot, aiming with his one good eye, because he had been paid off by Willie Bioff to keep the Jubilee lot quiet. The Reds themselves had done it because they were hungry for a movie star martyr. Someone even said Mossy had told a prop man to fire a blank at Pammy just to scare everyone away from joining unions, but the prop man accidentally had a real bullet in his pistol.

  Everyone had to wait at the studio while police swarmed into every office, every cutting room, all over the sound stages. Filming stopped. No one did any work.

  Late afternoon, Mossy called me in. Elena told me not to comment on his appearance. I was about to learn the short trip from tragedy to farce. Mossy had a shiner, his right eye almost closed. Yeatsman told me later Mossy had been caught the evening before, while I was having dinner with Pammy and Millie. He was caught not by Esther Leah but by an angry husband, the powerful entertainment lawyer Edgar Globe, who had come home unexpectedly from Chicago to find Mossy with his wife, Francesca. Francesca yelled, “Oh Jesus” when she heard her husband come in the front door. Mossy grabbed his pants and ran for the back stairs in the Globes’ Bel Air mansion. Like the cunning litigator he was, Edgar Globe anticipated his opponent’s next move and forsook his front staircase, intercepting Mossy halfway down the back stairs.

  “Edgar, you’re my lawyer,” Mossy had said, as if that squared things, was ethically exculpatory.

  “Not anymore, shithead,” Globe said, his fist crashing into Mossy’s face.

  Now Mossy gave me his visor squint, his black eye looking like a penlight trying to shine out of a dark tunnel. “I need you to do something for me,” he said.

  I was completely shattered, didn’t know how to respond or if I could do anything for anyone. “I’m very upset,” I said.

  “Sure you are. We all are, numb and crazy at the same time. I’m heartbroken.” He stopped and shook his head. “I’m a lot sadder than you may know, much sadder than I can show around here. But don’t stay gloomy. When you write it, kid, which one day you will, she don’t die.”

  “What are you talking about? She’s dead, gone.”

  “In the picture, she’s injured bad, very serious, legs gone maybe, and your hero has to take care of her the rest of her life. She’s in a wheelchair, bravely rolling herself in and out of scenes. She can still write her songs, ect ect you get it.”

  The annoying ect ect habit, more than I could take that afternoon, always let a listener know the scene went on and on, you figure it out.

  “I wouldn’t dream of writing about her,” I said.

  “I’m telling ya in the picture she can still write her sweet songs, ect ect ect.”

  “Her song is gone.”

  “C’maaahn, kid,” he said. “So you don’t get the girl. You get the memories.”
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  “The hell with you, Mossy. What did you want to see me about?”

  He ignored the affront to his authority. “I’m telling you, in the picture she don’t die.” Mossy used his ungrammatical Bronxian lingo judiciously, in this case to get cozy with me, as if he sensed, or even knew (though I shuddered to think about it) that he and I now and forever shared something of inestimable value.

  “Owen,” he said, “I’ll have to say a few words at the funeral. Today’s Thursday and we’ll do it here on the lot Saturday. Will you give me some help with this?”

  I walked out of his office without bothering to say no.

  On Friday I went to the studio but did no work. None of the writers did. I merely wanted to be around people who knew her but were not named Amos Zangwill, and I couldn’t bring myself to make the drive out to Red Woods yet. Millie was there with Costanza, who was teaching her how to play the new game of Monopoly. She had the whole rest of her life to be motherless, I rationalized. Mossy ordered that filming continue on all sound stages except for the one where Pammy had been working, which was to be the site of her funeral.

  Louella crowed her condescending condolence. “The shooting at Jubilee tragically cut short what should have been a long stellar career for Palmyra Millevoix. She had thrown herself back into her film Love Is for Strangers after the misadventure in San Francisco, reportedly inspiring her coworkers by giving her all until the mortal shot was fired. Poor Pammy, she thought she was bigger than the whole Hollywood system, and that was her fatal mistake. We all know what pride goeth before, and it did just that yesterday outside the Jubilee gates. We mourn the loss of her gifts if not her politics. One hates to say there’s a moral to this tale, but let’s hope the rest of our motion picture family, and we are a family, all stay with our assigned roles.”