by Carson, Tom
His politics would have been anathema to them, which just proves that attitude is the ultimate ideology. If you care to see a facsimile of my Bran’s public manner, look no further than the sack of vanilla vomit manqué I’ve rebaptized Murph Vanity, the nominal co-host of an obnoxious hour Tim Cadwaller calls The Thug and the Bug. Despite an only fleeting physical resemblance, since the original Bran was burlier and didn’t simper, Murph Vanity has the moxie down pat. The ability to swagger while sitting down is not a gift given most men.
The Bran I knew domestically, however, shows up an hour earlier, in the mightily towering form of Brannigan Gillooley. In this case, I’m relieved to say—I did have to bed the original—there’s no physical resemblance whatsoever. But oh, the truculence, combined with an injured certainty he’s more harassed than harassing, more badgered than badgering! The conviction that any hypocrisies we detect in his dust are irrelevant gnats to the deeper truths of his self-dramatization’s caravan; the futile wait for him to express sympathy or concern for any creature other than himself except adversarially. The show known to Pink Thing as The Gillooley Factor can take me back to Sutton Place, circa 1941–42, on Clio Airways faster than dreams.
Dour, implacable, bridling at his rivals, Murphy the playwright is represented by Bran Hume, as I once inadvertently called him aloud to Andy Pond when we spotted him seething at a steak in Martin’s. That he is the channel’s official anchor, but overshadowed in practice by his colleagues, fits Pink Thing’s memories of the original Bran as dramatist, social creature, and spouse to a T.
Bran Hume’s compassionate side only comes out when he fawns over his favorite interviewee: that underdog Chad Diebold, in all Chad’s many guises. His sense of appropriate cues for moral indignation can’t help reminding me of the real Murphy’s ability to lash out at the Girl Scouts as a nest of defeatists—selling us cookies on Sutton Place, one sweet little lass had innocently wished us peace, not victory, in ’42—while brushing aside the USSR’s collectivization famines as either Fascist lies or the fabled omelet’s recipe.
Since Pam’s never explained her private shock of wifely recognition, no wonder Andy’s baffled I spend so many nights watching the Murphy Channel. But I’m too pretzelly for sex, my cat is dead, my latest Hardy Boys doctor has limited me to two glasses of wine a day and there hasn’t been a new Kirsten Dunst movie since last October. My Bran’s unwitting epigones are the closest I’ll ever come to attending a séance.
Forty years dead, there my three-headed hubby is, inverted from Stalinist hack to jingo. Not that I’m implying his triple resurrection shares the original’s anti-Semitism, any more than I’d care to speculate they share his craving for a womanly knuckle up the giggie. Still, I’ve never forgotten something Gerson said once: “Someone’s always got to be the Jew.”
1952? 1952. In his Packard, not my newly acquired Olds, we’re driving into literal, not figurative, Hollywood. The Oscar ceremony’s at the Pantages this year and we’re meeting the DeWitts at the Frolic Room for a drink first. “Not to me, I hope,” I say.
“No. To someone with that mentality.” Gerson never much liked using Murphy’s name. “I don’t think it’s selfish to wish it wasn’t literally us so often. But once you can’t think without enemies, someone always has to be.”
Day in and day out, the Murphy Channel’s hunt for new Jews carries on. At different times, liberals, Muslims, illegal immigrants, atheists, and child molesters, among others—spot the genuine bad apple planted to spoil the barrel there—have all fit the bill. Not that I’ll be around to see it, bikini girl, but my sensational 1943 divorce from Murphy will get an odd reprise tomorrow. Once I’ve carried out my protest against this awful and unending war, I’m sure to spend all day as the Murphy Channel’s newest Jew.
Funny, too, since I always did enjoy playing the shiksa around real ones. If I have time when the White House calls, I just may switch on the TV to turn Murphy’s three-headed reincarnation into my witness. That’ll be Pam’s way of saying, “There! See the mess of pink and gray things on the rug, youse guys? Do you?”
Posted by: Pam
When we got cocktail-party chances to compare notes after our various escapes, it was agreed by all the later wives but Five (the widow, remember—she had something to protect) that we’d have been happier being one of the girlfriends. Didn’t really know how we’d ended up as the Mrs. Murphys instead, watching the cooze scoot by. “Moral of the story is,” said Four, always my favorite—touchingly, since he’d been on the skids by then, she had less worldly polish than Ruby or me, but was infinitely nicer—“there are some guys no woman with half a brain should go near unless he’s married.”
However, we were necessary, since Bran’s compulsion wasn’t sex as such but infidelity. The two-year gap between his breakup with Ruby and his wedding to me was the longest in his marital dossier, and everyone knew the explanation. Murphy had tried to go society, conducting an affair with an East Side dish blissfully named Elsie Dodge Plough. Closer to him in age than any of the wives, she was also rich in a way that made Bran’s Broadway loot look like the sawbuck sewn into a steerage passenger’s coat. That left her profoundly amused by his idea that she should divorce the Plough millions and hitch her costly wagon to his red star.
It must’ve bamboozled Murphy that a woman could get involved with him from priorities of her own: entertainment, mostly. When Pam met her long afterward, Fabergé-bosomed and Cartier-haired Elsie could’ve turned the Lotus Eater into a supplicant and poor Hormel into a puddle even at sixty. She made me laugh instead by repeating the line that had finally shut Murphy up about marriage: “Oh, Bran, why bother? Then I’d have to do something about you.”
Would that I’d been half as brainy. As I’m obliged to keep bleating, I was twenty-one. My intelligence still served only as an emergency technique for fencing with whatever had just been chucked at me, not a way of reaching an independent understanding of what was going on. Not only a world-class chucker, my first hubby was twice my age and a colossus in the world I most wanted to move in. Even when I saw through him, it excited my youthful vanity to see through a man so important.
So far as charisma and male persuasiveness go, keep in mind that the Brannigan Murphy you’re meeting on daisysdaughter.com is Pink Thing’s later and wiser dismantling. The only choice Murphy gave me at the time was between being swept away and swept under the rug, and like most twenty-one-year-olds I feared dismissals from others more than mistakes of my own. Besides, that much masculinity snorting at you is a powerful convincer of one’s femininity, and in those days the only definition of womanhood society trusted was a man’s. Don’t blame the goosey, easily rattled Pam I was if she clutched at getting her public certificate of non-Charybdean desirability from such a recognizable source.
If I’d had a better understanding of what the enjoyable part of the whole deal was, I’d have tried to sustain the romance by delaying the marriage. Even in the face of Addison DeWitt’s delighted cynicism and Jake Cohnstein’s amused sympathy—or was it the other way around?—it was fun to go around town as “Brannigan Murphy’s new girl,” the tizzied whisper that turned me into human Alka-Seltzer in public all July. I didn’t grasp that wedding bells would give Bran someone to be unfaithful to, only catching on the night A Clock with Twisted Hands opened in December.
Addison may’ve been the one who tried to warn me. “Well, dear girl!” he chortled in the Oyster Bar at Grand Central the day I got back from my honeymoon. “A shock is as good as a holiday. To think even I never guessed you’d end up the latest Mrs. Brannigan Murphy. You know, as I wrote once, we often wondered—”
“Never mind what we wondered,” said Jake. “Pam, just tell us you’re happy.”
“Jake! I wasn’t prying. I was about to quote myself. It’s a privilege not granted to many.”
“You could fool me,” Jake said. “And the publicists t
oo. Remember ‘Tesla Morse’s ecstatic Dots and Dashes deserves to run forever’? Well—”
“Not this poem. I was quite young when I wrote it. Shall I clear my throat first, or just wet it down?”
“Just so long as you don’t close your eyes,” Jake advised. “I’ll laugh you right out of your chair.”
Naturally, Addison did all three. “We often wondered,” he began.
We often wondered
What had been plundered
Before the wanderer
Met the panderer.
Was she a blunderer?
Asked the ponderer.
No, she was a child.
So said the wild.
“When did you write it?” I asked. “Oxford?”
“In the cab coming down here,” Addison said. “But I was already drunk.”
Posted by: Pam
The thunderheads that did loom over my marriage almost as soon as we got back from Maine were even triter than adultery. As I was learning domesticity wasn’t my strong suit, Murphy grew more adamant that it should be my only one.
Perhaps from fear of old Mrs. Gillooley, or whoever she’d been, hobbling out of his past with a beckoning talon and a gleam in her one good eye, he’d kept no maid since his bust-up with Elsie Dodge Plough. It was a shameful thing to do to a Deco apartment no matter how goddam Marxist you were. And ah, how the lacquer grew cloudy, darlin’, if you’ll allow me to Gillooleyize myself. Within a week, Cinderella in reverse—the way that movie usually runs outside theaters—there I was, scrubbing and dusting. Luckily, after my one attempt at dinner had sent Dottie Idell’s still moist ghost into gales of laughter, even Murphy acknowledged the pleasures of good restaurants.
He’d been incredulous that I meant to go on doing my book reviews for the old Republic and OC. Wasn’t I married to a real writer now—and hadn’t that been the goal? My bid to convert a small pantry into my workplace (it was the Sutton Place lair’s only windowless room, which I’d hoped might improve the odds) got refused: “You’ll put a cot in there next.”
He said so as if onto my treachery. As I hadn’t yet committed or contemplated any, I did feel a pang of compassion as I wondered from what recollected Gillooleyan or even pre-Gillooleyan betrayal that jeer had sprung.
Instead, once I’d cleaned up after breakfast, sent out the laundry, wiped down the lacquer, and retrieved the chrome ashtray I’d beaned the wall with last night, startling him but not altering Dolores Ibárurri’s bullet-eyed self-canonization by a hair, I used to set up my typewriter at the Queensboro Bridge end of the long living room table. The Mighty Tower looked down from its place of honor as I started pecking away. Often, sensing another glower beyond it, I’d glance up to catch my hubby, in the doorway of his own monumental, in every sense, office—he had bound volumes of every press notice he’d ever gotten, annotating the negative ones with “kike-fag-Trotskyite-traitor-hooey-go-to-Madrid-and-see-for-yourself” abuse—gazing at me with genuine if baleful perplexity, a cup of cold coffee in hand.
The thunderheads receded once A Clock with Twisted Hands was in production at the Rosalie Gypsum. Murphy was buoyed by the imminence of his first full-length play in four years, and to Pam’s relief script conferences with Pat Carpet, casting, and then rehearsals got him away from the house. Not that I ignored my chores or even moved my typewriter, but the work went more smoothly:
Beyond the author’s dim grasp of a Europe whose politics and landscape seem to be regrettably, if understandably, cobbled together from Hollywood back lots, Rita Cavanagh’s Sybil Choate is most marred by the mawkishness and triviality of the incidents she introduces to justify her heroine’s belated decision to join the underground. Surely, treating schoolgirl woes and an apparently thwarted romance as motivation for her final sacrifice can only insult the brave souls now resisting the occupier in reality. Given the crisis we all face…
Even so, my respite turned out to be shorter than expected. In November, rehearsals now underway in earnest, Murphy started pleading with me to come to the Gypsum, saying he needed my judgment: “Things aren’t going well, Snooks. I can’t see why for the life of me. I know this script’s true Murphy.” Given that he was bedding the ingenue, inviting me could’ve been either foolhardy or a numbskull’s idea of camouflage, but I rather think he wanted me to find out. Among the wives, even cautious Five agreed our discoveries seemed key to the infidelity scenario.
As yet unaware that pea-brained but pear-boobied Viper Leigh, née Betty Schtupter one day when Brooklyn was at loose ends, had been landscaping Bran’s mighty tower with her legs’ pale saplings for six weeks at the nearby Peter Minuit Hotel, I went along gamely enough. That was despite being under few illusions he really wanted Pam’s two cents. With Elsie Dodge Plough’s eye-opening course in what a loyal New York wife could get away with still fresh in his mind, it’d been exasperating him no end that his new wife refused to see anything wrong in going out to dinner, a bar, or, sin of sins, other plays with now de-Vermonted Alisteir Malcolm, Addison, Jake Cohnstein, or whoever from the old Republic and OC when he got kept late at the theater.
“Damn it,” he raged. “Don’t you at least have any hen friends?” Oddly or not, I didn’t, not then. Even Dottie Idell and I had stopped being chums once I’d quit Bank Street, something attributable mostly to a new discomfort on my end. I worried that if I saw my former roommate now, proudly showing off my still damply glued Mrs. Murphy mask, I might learn something I didn’t want to.
Posted by: Pam
No, Panama: I haven’t been holding back out of embarrassment. Your Gramela has just refused to believe ever since that it was at all consequential—the giggled “Dover or Calais?,” the scamper, the delirium of Dottie’s PJ-less warmth. I was pretty swacked the first time, and then it stopped seeming unusual. She was too light-hearted and silly, too exactly the same goofy joker in bed she was out of it, for her awkward roommate to believe our fooleries on Dover nights and Calais mornings mattered that much.
No doubt that’s one reason I wasn’t panicked by my usual warning images of the Charybdis temptation’s price: the tension etched in the Lotus Eater’s face by my mother’s idlest touch or glance, poor Hormel’s loneliness. Another reason was that we’d had no onlookers—myself for once included, you could say.
Yet now that I was one again, the thought of discovering I’d been wrong unnerved me. Spotting even the faintest wistful hint in Dottie’s eyes that our idyll hadn’t been so blithe as she’d affected would’ve been too horrible for words, and so that number stayed uncalled. That didn’t stop me from fretting she’d track Bran’s unlisted one down. Or even, in a scenario I imagined over and over, show up on our Sutton Place doorstep to confess she’d been ready to succumb to the Charybdis temptation in earnest—and with me of all people. I didn’t want to know.
Unless TV counts, I never did see her again. A few months later, my nightmare was laid to rest when I heard she’d married a man named Crozdetti and moved to Louisiana, and of course it’s as Dottie Crozdetti she’s much better known. Thanks to some tin-eared or unduly finicky copy editor, she was “Dottie I. Crozdetti” the last time I read her name in a headline, fleetingly making me and no doubt many others hope against hope—even though the small box on Page A1 had told us otherwise—that some other Dottie Crozdetti was no longer with us. But the photo of a hefty gray-haired woman laughing in her famous kitchen was the one everyone knew, and the obit was twice as long as any Bran got when he died.
And hell, if I’d just played my cards right—no, I’m joking, dear. It’s true nonetheless that, even among the few academics who still play Scrabble with Murphy’s work in hopes of spelling “Ph.D.,” A Clock with Twisted Hands does not rate high. Titled “Time Runs Out,” Garth Vader’s chapter on the play in Dat Dead Man Dere has two epigraphs, one from Pat Carpet: “Live by the clock, die by the calendar. That was Murph.
” As it’s a line from the play, I mildly resent the other being attributed to me: “Aaieee!”
The villain is a German industrialist, naturally in it up to his chin with Hitler, paying a weekend visit to the Connecticut home of an American newspaper magnate whose past conceals a secret. (Yes, Bran claimed Orson Welles had read an early version.) The purpose of Count von Deutrifau’s trip is to silkily persuade, then browbeat, then blackmail the publisher into maintaining “America First” isolationism as his vast media empire’s editorial policy. That’ll help keep Uncle Sam snoozing as Adolf tears into Poland France Norway Greece the USSR, where “The bastard may have finally bitten off more than he can chew”—to quote the stirring qualifier looped in above the Baedeker of cancellations in Bran’s two-year-old script.
Yes, the convention of the Suave Nazi was already established. But in his final rewrite, my hubby had let a few of his more teapot-sized tempests creep in. The man of the hour by first intermission, Addison pronounced himself delighted with his portrait. At the final curtain, the Count’s attempted rape (“Bit of a one-trick pony, aren’t you, Murph?” Addison—well, silkily—said) of the magnate’s virginal, politically even more so daughter, Vickie Patricia Lucy, had been thwarted by her fiancé, Brendan Leary. He was newly well, just last year long since returned from flying for the Loyalists in Spain. Once von Deutrifau had skulked back Third Reichward, hissing imprecations, Brendan bitterly indicted America’s theatergoers for their laggardliness in joining the fight against fascism.
His lies about his Spanish-American war service aboard the Maine exposed, the magnate was dead by his own hand. Offstage, but how I loathed hearing that gunshot. “Bit Prussian, wouldn’t you say?” was Addison’s unwittingly soothing comment at second intermission. “I think he should have beaten himself to death with a sled.”