by Peter Davis
A large house in San Marino was blasting forth “I’ll be brokenhearted ‘till the next time we kiss,/ I’ll be brokenhearted, It started when we parted, I’ll be brokenhearted, like thiiiiiis.” At a mansion half a mile away a loudspeaker had been installed on the lawn and was broadcasting “I can do anything except say goodbye Since the word by itself leaves a tear in my eye, So please don’t ask if you don’t want me to cry, I never have found where’s the good in goodbye.” Finally, a house was playing “Born Blue” and I was sure the trees themselves were drooping. It was a small home with a hedge around it in Azusa. “I’m born blue, blue, blue; That’s me not you, you, you; It’s always been true … that I was born blue.” Pammy herself knew her song fit its composer. For the girl of my dreams, there was never anything else she could be.
The song floated from homes on the afternoon wind. I heard “Born Blue” several more times—in Pomona, Claremont, finally in Upland itself as I approached San Antonio Heights, where Pammy lived. Lived on weekends. Had lived. “If you hear this song in a bar or a train, Put a nickel in the Wurlitzer and play it again.” I comforted myself with the sad smile that Pammy’s ghost must be tired of singing “Born Blue” by now.
Half a mile from the house was a roadblock. Eight or ten cars were pulled over to the side. The roadblock was manned not by police but by two uniformed guards. I recognized the familiar logo, a starburst with Jubilee Pictures inscribed below it. One of the guards approached me and I identified myself as a writer for the studio and a friend of the family needing to get through to the house to see Miss Millevoix’s daughter. The guard addressed me as if he were reading a script written for a Marine officer. “Mr. Zangwill’s orders were to keep everyone away until you were inside the property, sir,” the guard said. “Fans are showing up for some kind of vigil and we were instructed not to let anyone through until you were with the daughter.”
So Mossy was muscling in even now. He wasn’t doing any harm. Still, I resented his hand in creating the roadblock. I’d shortly be with the daughter.
I approached the Red Woods grounds, fronted by its row of date palms interspersed with camphor trees, which secluded the house from the road. Pammy had invited me here for the weekend and now here I was. I smelled the pungent camphor before the house was visible, and when I saw the trees I began to be nervous. The palms and camphors, which made agreeable pairs when I’d seen them before, looked uneasy, mismatched today. When I turned into the circular driveway Costanza and Millie rushed out to the front porch of the rambling old ranch house that Pammy had restored. Millie was carrying her puppy, Cordell, with his enormous paws on his small quivering body. How was I going to do this? What could Millie know? Costanza had assured me radios had been put in closets all over the house so Millie would not hear any news at all, much less stations devoting their entire programming to her mother.
As I pulled up in front of the porch Costanza was already talking to me. She was like an overfilled balloon ready to burst. “Mr. Owen, thank God, I’m so glad, I don’t know how long –” and she pointed to the edge of the driveway where, though I hadn’t noticed as I drove in, a photographer was camped, waiting for a picture of Millie.
“Uncle Owen,” Millie said, “what took you so long? We’ve been waiting for you all day. Will you tell me a story?”
Costanza had evidently continued to hold herself together since I’d last spoken to her on the phone. Now, as she saw me and knew what I had to tell Millie, her face was suddenly, though still silently, a stream of tears. I nodded at her and asked Millie to take me up to her room. Costanza ran to the kitchen and I heard her turn the water on in the sink to hide her bawling as I swept Millie into my arms and started to carry her up the stairs. “Oh, Uncle Owen, don’t be silly,” she said, “I can beat you upstairs any day.” She ran and I followed. Behind me Cordell struggled stair by stair.
Millie’s room had stars on the ceiling, a light shade of sky blue on the upper portion of the wall, a darker watery blue on the lower portion. On the wall was a large blown-up photograph of Pammy and Millie as they ran along a beach toward the camera. An eager pair, mirroring each other, all laughter, hair blown on their faces. We sat on Millie’s bed, Cordell at her feet. For a moment each of us looked at the other, and I could hear the seconds of Millie’s innocence ticking down. I took a deep breath and for some reason she did the same. “Millie honey,” I said, “I have to say something I’d give the world not to tell you.”
“Hush,” she said as she reached up and put her small hand over my mouth. “Let’s sing.”
34
Aftermath
Confounding my certainties, the General Strike in San Francisco not only happened but more or less succeeded, “more or less” being the operative phrase. No weapons, no more furious demonstrations, no violence. For most, it was a cheerful mutiny. Harry Bridges and the other labor leaders knew they could not beat machine guns and bayonets. Their weapons were numbers. By the thousands, men and women all over San Francisco and Oakland simply left their jobs, a gesture of bravery, perhaps bravado, at a time when over twenty percent of the workforce had no jobs at all. At the final strike vote Bridges announced, “The ayes have it and the nos know it.” In addition to the dockworkers, seventy-eight other unions joined the walkout. The General Strike was led by the Teamsters, who had earlier opposed it, and almost all factories and businesses in the Bay Area, even restaurants, were shut down. Some shops hung signs in their windows: “Closed Till the Boys Win.” “We’re Out as Long as You’re Out.”
The first woman ever to hold a Cabinet post, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, telegraphed President Roosevelt who, in that irony Bridges had aptly noted, was taking a cruise while the seamen and longshoremen were on strike. OFFICERS OF THE UNIONS, Perkins wired, HAVE BEEN SWEPT OFF THEIR FEET BY THE STRENGTH OF THE RANK AND FILE MOVEMENT STOP THERE IS UNUSUAL MASS MOVEMENT UNUSUAL SOLIDARITY AND UNITY STOP THERE HAS BEEN RELATIVELY LITTLE DISORDER UNTIL THE POLICE WERE PUT ON THE DOCKS WITH ORDERS TO SHOOT IF NECESSARY STOP THE SITUATION IS SERIOUS BUT NOT YET HOPELESS STOP.
When Secretary of State Cordell Hull (of Pammy’s jingle and Millie’s puppy) and Attorney General Homer Cummings advised that the U.S. Army be mobilized to put down the strike, Perkins warned that it would be unwise for the Roosevelt administration to start shooting it out with working people, especially working people who were only exercising their rights. She said the General Strike was not led by the Communists, who were loudmouthed but not in control, any more than by the traditional union leaders, who had pretty much been discarded. For his part FDR counseled from shipboard that he’d like to see arbitration, which had already failed to win support from either side. “A lot of people completely lost their heads,” he later recalled, “and telegraphed me that I should sail into San Francisco Bay, all flags flying and guns double-shotted, and end the strike.” He did nothing. Perhaps more presidents should take more vacations; Roosevelt continued his cruise and let the conflict run its course.
The course, in the event, was a short one. With the Bay Area approaching a crisis as the basic provisions of food and gasoline were cut off, the mass walkout of over one hundred thousand men and women lasted only four hot July days. As the General Strike went into its second and third days, panic ruled the business districts. In contrast, Mike Quin wrote me gleefully, a holiday spirit prevailed in working-class neighborhoods. “Like the workers themselves,” Quin said, “the owners know perfectly well no revolution is coming, but they use revolutionary rumors as a strategy to scare the middle class.” He couldn’t finish his thought without landing an uppercut to my jaw, to everyone in the picture business: “You show good people as well dressed and groomed and polite with clean shirts on, the better sort; rough features and soiled clothes are signs of the underworld and the lower classes, not people you’d want to associate with. Workers and people who look like workers, that’s who the movies paint into crime scenes.”
The Teamsters, who began the General Strike, broke
it, leaving Longshoremen in the lurch, and then the Longshoremen went back to work, leaving the Seamen on dry land. Quickly, all the unions followed the Teamsters and returned to their jobs. The solidarity that Harry Bridges wanted vanished even from his own union (he had opposed going back to work), and it appeared, as San Francisco caught its breath again, that the owners had won.
Yet the strike changed the labor scene. The solidarity was gone, but the fear remained, and this time the fear belonged to the owners. If this happened once, they understood, it could happen again. At another mass meeting in Dreamland—one of many during the next few weeks—federal, municipal, and union officials were all shouted down when they urged settlements favoring the dock and shipowners. A chant of “We Want Bridges!” went up throughout the auditorium until Bridges took the stage and said all workers had nothing to lose by standing firm until their demands were met.
When the inevitable arbitration—proposed by FDR—was over, the longshoremen won almost everything they had struck for. Wages rose, hours declined, overtime pay became standard, working conditions improved. Most importantly, the company union on the docks was gone, and the International Longshoreman’s Association became the sole bargaining entity for the dockworkers. Daily hiring was put under the nominal control of both the employers and the union, but since the dispatcher had to be from the union, only union members were dispatched. The power of the longshoremen, and the authority of Harry Bridges, remained solid for decades.
Defiantly, the longshoremen’s newspaper printed a declaration: “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” The foregoing is not, the newspaper went on to point out, an instruction from Moscow. It is a quotation from Abraham Lincoln.
Union fever was rising in Hollywood too. I joined the Screen Writers Guild, barely out of the larva stage, the precursor of the other talent guilds. At Jubilee, even the producers were talking about forming a guild until Yeatsman went to them and said, “You blind bats—what the hell do you think a studio is, or the Motion Picture Academy itself for Christ’s sake, if not a producer’s association?”
Mossy assigned Nils Matheus Maynard to direct the love story, if it was that, of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The executives reasoned that Nils’s hemophilia would enhance his sensitivity to the bleeding disease that affected Victoria’s own family. The studio also announced it would produce the biography of its fallen star. The picture was to be called Crusading Angel and would be written by Jamie McPhatter, Sylvia Solomon’s bombastic heavy drinking former escort, who had never known Pammy but who had come up with the title. I vowed to sabotage this project and told myself it would be for Millie’s sake. McPhatter was halfway through the first draft when one night I wrote him an anonymous memo that his pages reeked of maudlin insincerity masking his reactionary contempt for his subject. Whether because of my nastiness—I hadn’t seen a word he’d written—or because Comfort O’Hollie purposely mangled his scenes as she typed them, McPhatter stayed drunk for the next week and then was taken off the script. The title was changed, fresh writers were put on the story, but the project was allowed to dwindle before anything serious was done about it. Who, for instance, would expose herself to the darts that would be aimed at any actress presuming to impersonate Pammy?
In the weeks following Pammy’s death I could barely function. Memory was still too sharp a pain to allow the thought to surface that most people went their whole lives without knowing Palmyra Millevoix while I—and selected others I chose to ignore—had been brushed by the wand of a fairy godmother who granted the wish I had never dared to wish. And then snatched it away. I felt like a painter who contrived to put a singular wash over his canvas that would, years later, bring out the colors even more vividly than when he first applied them. Instead of fading, the pigments became stronger, burned more brightly, than they had even in the moment. The only lasting solace came to me decades later, after the war, with the relief that she had not had to endure the frightful Hollywood blacklist, the years of betrayal and ostracism and cowardice.
Love Is for Strangers, the picture Pammy was making when she died, was near enough to completion that Mossy wanted it released and knew Millevoix fans would flock to it. The principal scene that Pammy hadn’t lived to film was the reunion with her mother when the latter is enduring her fatal illness. Pammy’s entrance to the sickroom had already been shot. The rest of the scene plays in close-ups of Ethel Barrymore and medium shots of Pammy’s stand-in from behind looking at Ethel, whose earlier hauteur has given way to apologetic humility. Pammy’s lines were shortened to a simple, “It’s all right, Mother, it’s all right,” played over the back of the stand-in’s head. The words were borrowed from an earlier picture where she had been Marie Dressler’s daughter and Marie had accidentally poisoned the family dog. Nils retrieved a shot from a third picture, a scene where Pammy had been about to kiss Trent Amberlyn and the shot had been over Trent’s shoulder. Nils had this blown up to eliminate Trent and create a close-up of Pammy, then matted it into the room where Pammy was visiting Ethel. The way the shot emerges, instead of expectantly awaiting a kiss from the gay actor Pammy now looks eager for reconciliation with her mother. For the final shot of the scene, Ethel insists on getting out of bed and kneels to bury her head in the stand-in’s lap, eternally sorry for having been such an antiquated fool. The scene, and the picture, ends when she raises her head and says to Pammy, “Now when can I see my grandchild?”
The slight solace that did come to me within months was a weak, bitter tea. I found myself at Jubilee one morning in the fall, the grim weeks of the Santa Ana wind when the dry air blasts everything in its path. Against the wind’s moan, I was in Mossy’s office with a clutch of others having a story conference. I had come to be soothed by these meetings, whose levity opposed my grief; I could say anything and get away with it without paying much attention because no one was paying much attention to me. Haunting the story conferences of other writers who were glad to have someone along to dodge barbs with, I was protected from being alone in my office with nothing to do, from direct images of Pammy and her laughter, the way she sounded, her half smile, and always the hole that sprung in her forehead. “Let’s have Teresa pregnant then, already pregnant when she steps off the train even if we don’t know it yet,” Yeatsman was saying. “Then when she meets Trent, we know she’s been through hell and he has to do some thinking himself. He’s always too goddamned naïve if you ask me, with that knowing but basically ignorant grin. It’s time Trent Amberlyn grew up.”
A stunned silence. I’d only half-heard Yeatsman. Should I try to rescue him or was Mossy about to take up the idea? “Very funny, Yancey,” Mossy at last chipped in mirthlessly. “The Hays Office let a woman unbenefitted by clergy just suddenly be knocked up, walk pregnant right into a movie? Let’s be serious.”
The sex scandals of the Twenties having hobbled Hollywood, the Hays Office was the rigid morals police. Yet Yancey was on the right track. I came to life, in my fashion. “No, no, the woman had a husband,” I offered, “and the guy climbed on the top of the train to rescue a hobo who’d gotten stuck up there. It was their honeymoon. He fell off, widowing her within a week of their wedding. Now she can be pregnant.”
“You’re coming out of your coma,” Mossy said. “Thanks, pal,” Yeatsman said.
That’s right, I thought. It’s high time Trent Amberlyn grew up.
I was put to work on the screenplay of Lorna Doone, the English adventure tale of warring clans and ultimately triumphant romance. At last: I could write the story of a man who actually saves the woman he loves even though she does get shot. That buoyed me. It wasn’t my story—in Hollywood you don’t write your own story—but it was a reclamation project all the same.
I collect and recollect. Especially in Hollywood, memory is a function of myth, a product of whoever has the st
rongest fantasy of the moment, the most persistent dream. Dreams don’t only matter; they are matter. In a climate of exaggeration, where within weeks we all come to believe our own superlatives, who could say which were, pardon me, really true, and which mere figments? What if I am the undetected guest at the banquet of life? Nothing more than a speck in a landscape by Watteau. A derivative figure with its uses in the painting, drawing the eye to significance, perspective, the vastness of everything else, how sublime it all is in comparison with the speck.
Yancey cheered me, or tried to, one day when he shot a question at me direct from Yeats, a query both soothing and unanswerable: “‘Does the imagination dwell the most On a woman won or a woman lost?’”
He had me there.
Years later, when Yeatsman was questioned about Gloriana Flower’s Party party, where he had contributed a thousand dollars, he refused to say anything to his inquisitors beyond a passage from his sage: “‘O but we dreamed to mend Whatever mischief seemed To afflict mankind, but now That winds of winter blow Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.’” They cited him for contempt.