by Peter Davis
When he emerged from the blacklist, Yancey persevered in Hollywood. His later gloom—I wouldn’t call it tragedy—was that his originals seldom got made and weren’t very successful. His regret was that he neither went home, as he called it, to novels and plays nor did he become a director, which would have enabled him to guide his pages onto the screen. His adaptations continued to pay him handsomely, and he was too gracious to allow self-contempt, the occupational hazard of screenwriters, to leak out. He was still in good form on his eightieth birthday, quoting the master as always: “‘Did all old men and women, rich and poor, Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door, Whether in public or in secret, rage As I do now against old age?’” When he was finally installed at Forest Lawn a few years back, a cheeky young writer, jealous of Yeatsman’s status, said in the commissary after Yancey’s sound stage memorial service that his headstone should bear the Yeats quote, “‘The best lack all conviction.’” Mossy, no longer head of the studio but still its biggest stockholder and on hand that day for Yancey’s service, had the writer fired on the spot.
Gloriana Flower’s party took its toll on others as well. When political investigations strafed Hollywood Edward G. Robinson was accused, twenty years later, of having had the temerity or bad judgment to attend Gloriana’s gathering. To this charge he replied both sheepishly and defiantly. He said he’d been naïve, on the one hand, and that on the other hand it was nobody’s business but his own where he went and what he did. Sylvia Solomon, my obliging date at the party, put her own situation succinctly after being named by, of all people, Mitch Altschuler, perhaps the most passionate Communist any of us knew. “Why was I a Communist?” she repeated the Congressional investigator’s question. “Well, since the Communists were the only people standing up for what I believed in against the terrifying inequality and prejudice and economic rapaciousness in America, it seemed silly not to be one of them.” She was duly blacklisted. As for the two Communist recruiters at Gloriana’s house, Greta Kimple and Mort Leech, they were agents provocateurs. When they finished seducing, in their curious way, new Party members, they shed their Red masks to reveal that their true faces were those of the FBI. They turned in everyone they’d ever turned, including Kimple’s brother and Leech’s wife, whom he promptly divorced. Then Greta Kimple and Mort Leech married.
When the inquisition came for me, small potatoes, I was a step ahead of it. I’d left Hollywood for Rome and buried myself in spaghetti Westerns until the storm blew over.
Hindsight, reputed to be twenty-twenty by social ophthalmologists, is actually muddied by everything that happened between the event and whatever present we choose for our judgment platform. The Communist functionaries Zinoviev and Kamenev, for instance, specified by Mitch Altschuler as Jews Stalin valued in his inner circle, were purged and executed in 1936. Mitch scoffed at the possibility that Hitler would kill all five hundred thousand Jews in Germany; Hitler, of course, was only clearing his throat when he reached the half million mark in dead Jews. Having named all the Red names he could think of for the House Un-American Activities Committee, Mitch managed to remain employed in Hollywood, but he lost his furious wife and most of his friends. “I saw the light when the Korean War started and I knew my own country was fighting the Communists,” Mitch told the Committee, though in fact he had signed a protest against the war right after it began in 1950.
For labor racketeering and extortion Willie Bioff was eventually sentenced to ten years in prison. Alcatraz did not suit his Hollywood tastes, and he soon asked to testify against his former confederates. Five of them were convicted, and Bioff was paroled. A dozen years later, after moving to Arizona and changing his name to Bill Nelson, becoming friends with Barry Goldwater and going into business with the senator’s nephew, Bioff started his pickup one morning and the explosion blew his body parts twenty-five feet from the wreckage. Hollywood treated its informers with the alternating current of professional rehabilitation and social ostracism; the mob’s solution was simpler.
In San Francisco, the anniversary of Bloody Thursday was marked for many years by a memorial to martyrs when longshoremen stopped work in honor of Nick Bordoise and Howard Sperry. Harry Bridges became an institution. Mike Quin wrote his own account of the dockworkers’ strike but died before it was published.
Time is a controlling force here, a character enacting its own will. No good reason exists for it to go forward always and not turn around the way other characters do, or even travel in a curve endlessly encircling itself. If time is arbitrary and indivisible, as physicists come closer each year to believing, Pammy is still singing and Yancey still quoting, or in another sphere they have not yet begun. Pammy will always be available melodically regardless of the state of recording technology. We may as easily find Mossy Zangwill dressing, conscientiously outfitting himself in front of his wife or a mistress as we might discover Achilles girding himself for battle. It is not purely a sadistic joke, though the slimeball means it that way, when my agent tells me it is part of Hollywood’s doctrinal minutiae that my own future is behind me. So it has been always.
The time is coming when we will venture both into what we decide is the known past as well as the unknown future. Then we will know whether Palmyra Millevoix studied music formally—I never asked her—or just let it flow from her, whether she knew she was going to die, whether she loved me or merely flung her charms in my direction for the nonce to amuse herself.
Dr. Pogorzelski wondered if we are dreaming or dreamed. I knew the answer finally. We are encased within our own dream, dreamers and dreamed both. An actor is only someone performing in someone else’s dream. When Pammy dies she is no longer dreaming but instantly becomes, forever, anyone else’s dream. The dream within the dream, ect ect ect as Mossy would put it. You dream of a prince who dreams of a princess who dreams of a bear who dreams of a seal who dreams of a queen who dreams of you.
In the parallel universe where antimatter presides, there are no films but anti-films. These are the movies we writers write that never get made. I have my name on quite a few of these, some starring such luminaries as Spencer Tracy and Olivia de Havilland, others stocked with unknowns I thought would be right for my screenplays. There are even anti-movies of movies that did get made but with other casts. Casablanca not with Bogart and Bergman but with the benign Fred MacMurray or earnest Ty Power and the no-nonsense Maureen O’Hara or Loretta Young. Can’t you see MacMurray or Ronald Reagan or Robert Montgomery wrinkling their sincere brows to say “I was misinformed” when told the waters are nowhere near Casablanca, or later, “We’ll always have Paris”? And Loretta Young, who would never acknowledge having had a love child (as they were called then) with Clark Gable in real life, how about her trying to say throatily, “I wish I didn’t love you so much,” or “Kiss me, kiss me as if it were the last time”? Tinny? Can we say Palmyra Millevoix continues to sing in this parallel universe, and does her unconscious exist there too? I don’t believe in ghosts, but what exists exists.
Millie Millevoix moved in with her Aunt Elise and her cousins. I looked in on her and she was doing all right, a new school in the fall and her puppy Cordell embraced into the new family as its only male figure. Millie didn’t ask me to tell stories anymore.
The police did detain a few suspects but only for questioning. They had no real evidence. Anyone could have done it. People have asked me whether Pammy would have been killed if she hadn’t gone to San Francisco and been inspired, or fooled, or inoculated into believing the waterfront strike could be exported, transposed, down the coast to a Hollywood studio. Pammy was hardly ignorant of the differences between dockworkers and filmmakers. She was excited by the possibilities of steering Hollywood, such a company town, toward a condition where the distribution of wealth and power was more equitable. She would, I imagine, have cheered the breakup of the old studio system that took place after the war, and she would also, I further imagine, have been appalled at the power that fell, as a result of the breakup, into the
hands of prima-donna actors and autocratic directors. But I don’t know. Perhaps she’d have become a prima donna herself.
The course of Palmyra Millevoix, viewed from the twinkling interval when left was right and right was wrong, or from the year she served in the blood bank during the First World War until she made tourniquets for the San Francisco strikers and mounted the platform outside Jubilee Pictures, has the arc and thrust of an appointed curve. If she could speak to us from her crypt at Forest Lawn, I have no doubt she would say, “What happened to me signifies nothing, only destiny. We make our choices and our choices, in their sweet turn, make us. Someone please watch over Millie.”
Years later a French director trying his luck in Hollywood told me he had glimpsed Pammy once, in solitude, in the early Twenties, on a promenade outside a dance at Cap d’Antibes. The Eden-Roc, vanilla cream marble, and the lordly look of statuary, facing off against the shadowy Mediterranean. He said she was smiling to herself and there was a small roar from the sea as she walked slowly toward the balustrade and the hotel glided backward. He didn’t dare disturb her. I see her present in his wistful sketch, the way she inhabited her diaphanous ballgown, in heartbreaking profile, looking out over the terraced gardens leading down to the blue, dark water, spinning her web whether anyone watched or not, everything yet to come.
Author’s Note
My primary source for this novel was growing up in Hollywood, the son of screenwriters, in the decades following Owen Jant’s coming of age in the 1930s. The time before my time drew me to itself like a Venus flytrap I couldn’t escape, a black hole I desperately wanted to shine some light into. Additionally, my shelves hold more than sixty books on one or another aspect of motion pictures, the Great Depression, the San Francisco dockworkers’ strike, the American Communist Party, popular songs, magic, and hemophilia.
A few books seemed to become, along with my own background, part of my DNA. An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood by Neal Gabler, and City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s by Otto Friedrich are both enriching. Though my imagination flew back to the 1930s, specifically a few heady months in 1934, Friedrich couldn’t resist taking informative backward glances to see what went on earlier that made the Forties what they became. Likewise, Gabler’s superb portrait of Hollywood was not restricted to what Jews themselves contributed.
The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley contains almost numberless oral histories and accounts of the dockworkers’ strike in San Francisco. The two books I found particularly helpful are Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s by Bruce Nelson, and The Big Strike by Mike Quin, published after his death. I was using it for research when one day Quin marched right out of his own book and into my story.
One fictional character in Girl of My Dreams is also not original. Bruno Leonard, the professor from New York who harangues the faithful at Gloriana Flower’s party, was first a character in The Unpossessed by Tess Slesinger, a novel published in 1934. My justification for this is I think it’s okay to steal from your own mother.
Acknowledgments
Authors traditionally thank immediate family members last. Get the better half into this even if it feels like an afterthought. I prefer first coming first. Without the critical eye, perseverance, advice, and patience of my wife, Alicia Anstead, a writer and editor herself, this novel would not exist in anything like its present form. My daughter, Tonia Davis, a studio executive, pored over an early draft as if she were Sherlock Holmes sleuthing a misdeed. While she may not have solved the crime, she certainly humbled the criminal.
I am grateful to others who read versions or portions of the novel. Sally Arteseros provided useful editorial help on an early draft. Additionally, Dr. Henry Kandler, Andrea Pitzer, John Mankiewicz, Jeffrey Lewis, Professor Christie McDonald, and Elizabeth Murphy all gave beneficial advice, criticism, and suggestions.
Laura Starrett has copy-edited with an admirable attentiveness to detail.
I very much appreciate Open Road’s having become the highway for Girl of My Dreams.
My agent, Julia Lord, has seen this novel through many drafts and revisions; she has my lasting gratitude along with my hopes that her other authors don’t take so long.
About the Author
Peter Davis is an acclaimed author and filmmaker whose writing has won praise from Graham Greene, John Irving, Robert Stone, and William Styron. He covered the war in Iraq for the Nation and was a contributing editor for Esquire. He spent eighteen months traveling among the poorest Americans for If You Came This Way, the title of which is from a poem by T. S. Eliot. Davis’s films have won many prizes, and he received an Academy Award for his documentary on the Vietnam War, Hearts and Minds.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Peter Davis
Cover design by Neil Alexander Heacox
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