4

Fame: A Lamentation

“Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-yay, here comes our Joel McCrea, his star shines night and day, Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-yay!” Mossy’s crier ushered special guests into the party as they descended the steps from the foyer to the long living room that had been turned into a ballroom by Jubilee’s prop department. “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-yee, let’s welcome Edward G., hope he’s not mad at me, ’cause if he is I’ll flee.” The crier, who accompanied himself on an accordion, was an assistant producer named Teet Beale. His face looked as if it had been stomped on yet he had clearly spent the afternoon in a Jubilee makeup room. High arched, plucked eyebrows, hair dyed the red of an ace of diamonds. Beale had the performed jolliness of a court jester who knows of an impending beheading that hasn’t been announced yet.

This was my first big-name Hollywood festivity, the first time I’d been at Mossy’s house in the three years I’d worked, off and on, for him. The word “party” applied to the evening not as a merry gathering but as an ecclesiastical chain of command from the cardinal on down. The guests were less a cast of characters in any particular production than a directory of those who had caught and held and in turn craved Mossy’s attention. They looked as if they belonged on a Quattrocento canvas that included everyone who was anyone in Florence. Mossy himself had yet to put in an appearance at his own gala; he was said to be upstairs.

With no one paying attention to me, I looked around. The place was lavish, of course, Spanish colonial for a grandee at least, perhaps a prince. Yet I had the sense of rooms that were the outcome not so much of furnishing as looting. The style was imperial arriviste, with everything, from pictures to couches, appearing to have come from boxcars that had been uncrated that morning. The walls held Van Ruisdale, Giorgione, Van Gogh, Renoir, Manet, each one plaqued with the artist’s name and dates as if it were in a museum but with an effect more aggressive than informative.

Guests floated by me snatching canapés from the trays of Filipino houseboys, engaged not really in conversation but in ultimatum. “You’ll have to choose, Lansing, between this town and me because I can’t stand it here anymore, fetch me a martini.” “Get me Loretta Young and you can have anyone you want.” Two men in doublebreasted suits were trading movie stars as if they were playing cards or hog futures. “I’ll give you Shearer for Talmadge but you have to send her back eight weeks maximum. Thalberg will insist.” A sleek high-cheekboned woman cast a frozen look at her weary ascotted watery-eyed husband whose hand was in the crotch of the scared brown boy who was passing escargots. “Oh Roo Roo,” he said, “don’t be so Oyster Bay.” And the most familiar refrain: “I’ll never work with either of them again and that’s final.”

The room was filling up with both failure and conspiracy, neither of which I could recognize on this Saturday evening in my yearning twenties. I was so surrounded by what I took for success I was blind to everything but what shone. I felt green and dumb, as if I’d been in Hollywood three days instead of three years. Guests were auditioning for other guests’ opinions as well as their absent host’s; here was where you found out where you stood on the weights and measures of the town, and on the scale covering the ballroom floor I weighed less than an ounce.

“Where, for God’s sake, is our host with his gaze blank and pitiless as the sun?” I whirled at the basso voice to find Yancey Ballard, the writer of historical adventures like Spanish Armada and Caesar’s Curse. The lanky, cheerful, cynical Yancey was known to his fellow screenwriters and even to a number of producers as Yeatsman due to his affection for, and inclination to quote, the poet himself. He’d work Yeats into any conversation, usually without attribution. Yancey was one of the literary finds B. P. Schulberg made when he raided New York and Chicago after talkies began requiring writers to have a semblance of skill with dialogue and not merely the ability to type “THE BUTLER FINDS THE MASTER IN A COMPROMISING POSITION WITH THE UPSTAIRS MAID.” Originally from Alabama, Yancey worked for the New York Herald Tribune and had a hit novel, The Red Cloak, to his credit before Schulberg recruited him.

Yancey read my mood and quoted his bard. “Feeling a bit lost, chum? Forget it. Your youth’s gone quickly here, leaving faith and pride to young upstanding men climbing the mountainside.” When we first met at Jubilee Yancey had wished me luck and said he’d once been in Hollywood for six weeks too, adding that that had been four years and a marriage ago. “But how do you tell,” I asked, surveying the ballroom, “who counts for what around here?”

“Ah, that’s the trick,” he said, “in Hollywood both the best and the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

“Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-yah, comes Pammy Millevoix,” bleated Teat Beale. Elegant, sultry Palmyra proceeded into our midst on the arm of the forgettable actor Rolfe Sedan. Proud, not prideful, Pammy smiled and nodded at a few familiars as she advanced into the collective consciousness of the gathering. Her mane, the shade of melted butter, hung not quite to her shoulders, and her pale green shantung gown traversed her breasts in ripples, hugging the almost African curve of her hips and thighs. As for Rolfe Sedan, he was a date arranged by the studio, where someone was hoping he would become Jubilee’s answer to Ramon Novarro, who was already passé himself.

When she disengaged herself from Sedan at the foot of the stairs, light from the nearest chandelier caught the slight downturn of Pammy’s eyes. This was her bone structure, really, yet it seemed a guide to what was always lurking no matter how she laughed, at herself and others. In her demeanor Pammy was an ardent child of the flapper age—excessive, elusive, playful, willful, idealistic but also skeptical. Her involvement in the songmaking repertory and the physical abandon in her singing does a hairpin turn when she appears rebellious and even scandalous one moment while in the next she becomes deeply romantic and traditional.

She was not a mingler. She swept around the room greeting, detaching, accepting a martini, pausing for a moment’s intense exchange, moving on. I noticed, of all things, her eyebrows, wispy boundaries between her wide forehead and her hazel eyes. She used her brows to gesture, almost like hands. One would be up while the other was down, or they’d be spread in laughter, or they’d shade her eyes that transmitted, apparently with no reference to anything being said or enacted, the merest suggestion of cloud. Her one-sided smile curved up on the left while on the right her lips stayed closed and serious. That partially upturned smile is what never fades. Palmyra’s nostrils widened slightly, even flared in key scenes, giving her face a look of desire whether it existed or not.

That was the thing about a star; she or he conveyed instantly something about themselves even if what was being conveyed, as with Trent Amberlyn, was utterly false. What made a star? Attitude and presence, an insistent energy, though what kind of energy varied from star to star. But looks. Looks are so often what we recall. Beauty, yes, yet imperfections, caricaturable badges, make as much impression as the soi-disant glories. Bette Davis’s foggy voice, Cagney’s features all gathered at the center of his face. The pouches under Bogie’s eyes. Crawford’s mile-wide slash of a mouth, Stanwyck’s sneer, you pick it, that singular feature setting a thirty-foot image apart from all others. That is what invaded our fantasies, a minute particular that was like no one else and became the skeleton key admitting its bearer to our unconscious.

Palmyra Millevoix’s singularity was a small bend in her nose that began perhaps three quarters of an inch below the bridge and made the nose slightly steeper until it reached the famous flared nostrils. This bend was too small ever to be confused with a bump, but it did give Pammy a serious mien that the perfect little button noses, so cherished at the time, did not possess. The nose was made gentler by three or four freckles that often had to disappear for scenes in which any suggestion of cuteness would be a contradiction of mood or even class. It was her eyes, set apart like two cabochons, their greenish gray accentuated by the distance between them, that heralded Palmyra’s more perfect aspect. Their downturn, echoed in the sloping eyebrows, gave her even when she smiled the hint, the memory, or possibly the foretaste, of rue.

I pushed forward into a throng of young studio people as anonymous as myself; we were what the trades called hopefuls. It was true, we did live on hope, and when we were out of work it was even what we ate. I strained to hear any buzz about A Doll’s House. Pretending to have as good a time as anyone, downing gins and tonic until the grand hall began to swirl, I was approximately a stage prop.

What does fame mean? I wondered. These people have it—Spencer Tracy, Palmyra Millevoix of course, C. B. DeMille, sometimes it’s fame-by-affiliation as with Mrs. John Barrymore. A few flee from it but the rest seem to experience it as a form of immortality as well as an aid to mortal survival. Always falsity is present because they’re pretending to something greater, more extended, than they could possibly be. For Trent Amberlyn fame is two-edged because he does want to be famous—it’s all he has ever known he wanted—and he also wants to role-play, which is why he became an actor in the first place. But he hates being famous for what is in fact alien to him, and he hates living a lie, which makes him hate himself for not being what he is famous for being. Tonight his studio-arranged date is Palmyra’s young friend, Teresa Blackburn, who will have a major part in a new Jubilee picture. Studio talk had it that Mossy played with the idea of a well photographed romance with Palmyra herself. To Trent anything is better than being Bernard Gestikker from Otumwa, Iowa, which is who and where he began—but he’d prefer not having to sneak his real self around corners. Bernard Gestikker was a misfit in Iowa; Trent Amberlyn is fine in Hollywood, but not all of him.

Shadows darted past, ignoring me. Was that Miriam Hopkins, George Arliss, Basil Rathbone? A fan might have felt he’d died and gone to Heaven; I thought I had vanished. They were not the shadows; I was.

The emergence of Hana Bliner and Wren Harbuck through the French doors leading to the Zangwill’s fabled garden grabbed all eyes. They had thought to slip back into the party unnoticed, the starlet Hana and Mossy’s assistant production chief Harbuck, but everyone spotted them. Hana was still fastening a strap while Wren, known for his polish and manners, was trying desperately both to knot his tie and re-part his oiled hair. He coughed explosively, as if that would disguise his recent errand from his wife and the other guests.

When the laughter and scattered applause died down, I walked over to the French doors to look at the famous garden, as brightly lit as a stage. Mossy and Esther Leah planned it after a voyage to England; they had seen the Chelsea Flower Show and then gone north to the Thane of Cawdor’s lush estate in the Highlands. Peering into Mossy’s garden yielded little of its rumored excesses, which were blocked by arbors and hedges, but I could tell it stretched for acres. Amos Zangwill was as particular with his plantings as with his stars. When he saw the garden and the mansion it ringed, George Bernard Shaw’s comment was that he wished he could rewrite Heartbreak House.

Next to me, Wilma Ockenfuss of Variety, chubby as a strawberry, asked if I thought the Harbuck indiscretion with Hana Bliner had to be a blind item or if the presence of so many guests as witnesses made it possible to write a straight account of their emergence through the French doors and what had undoubtedly preceded it. “Heh heh,” I said through all the gin I’d gulped, “shall we sally forth to see the garden’s charms for ourselves?” Shrugging, she moved off in the direction of Tutor Beedleman, one of Jubilee’s more genial writers but also one who disliked the press. I heard the silly woman say to Tutor, gesturing in my direction, “How can someone be so young and already out of date?” Then she asked him the question—blind item versus using names—she had asked me. “Water, Wilma, seeks its own level,” Tutor said, “and so does slime.”

Taking my arm, Tutor guided me to the safety of other writers. Guests clustered around the room according to hierarchy, vocation, or ideological preference, as the fugitive Alabaman Yancey Ballard described them to me. He unfurled his collective nouns as a banner of disillusion. “See the blush of Reds,” he said, “hugging the bottom of the stairs to proselytize newcomers. A cloudburst of actors have spread themselves throughout, drenching us in fragile ego. Over there at the buffet table a hazard of agents gabs while across from them is a threat of producers. And wouldn’t you know it, under the fanciest chandelier stands an ostentation of directors while around us, never straying from the bar, hovers the grumble of screenwriters.”

The little Red cell, next to a potted palm Esther Leah had draped a pearl necklace around, had their satisfied zeal and camaraderie. “In Russia there’s time only for struggle, one said, “not like this country where we waste our breath arguing over the best highway to Hell, this country where we haven’t had a revolution since the eighteenth century.” “It’s coming soon,” said another. “Then we’ll see,” said a third, “what people can do with their own bare hands to make the new society.”

Power stalked the premises. Without bothering to waste one of his famous glares at the Reds, Edgar Globe was working the party, the burly entertainment lawyer wading into any conversation he wanted to dominate. Globe was with his slinky long-lashed Texas wife, Francesca, who swept her eyes over the important men in the room and held a director’s hand a half beat too long when she shook it. The couple was up to no good.

Photographs in the Zangwill den, where I wandered alone, paired Mossy with Charles Lindbergh, with Mrs. Roosevelt, with Noël Coward, Bobby Jones, Dempsey, Tunney, Babe Ruth, Barney Baruch, and so on. These were composites tricked up for Mossy by Jubilee’s art department in the early days when the studio, and Mossy, needed status by association. Years later, when he met one of these people and an actual photograph was taken, as with Lindbergh and George Bernard Shaw, Mossy replaced the earlier composites he’d had made unless he preferred the fake ones, which he often did.

I was assailed by a vision of Mossy as the Chinese emperor who, to cover his tracks, had all those killed who had built his monuments—in this case Jubilee’s movies. Everyone in the photographs, at the party and in Jubilee’s pictures, would be destroyed by Mossy, none left to redress his wrongs or tell his secrets. He was so far only a ghost at his own party, a commanding absence. Perhaps he planned to—

“A thousand a week for your thoughts, Wallflower,” Sylvia Solomon said as she tapped me on the shoulder. The highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood had decided to spy on Mossy’s den herself.

“Apparently my thoughts are worth less than a third of that,” I said.

“Then for your delusions,” she said. About a dozen years older than I, Sylvia made the most of not being particularly pretty or even pretending to be. Everyone at Jubilee confided in her, and no one went far trying to get the better of her, including two refined, thirsty and constitutionally unemployed husbands who had more or less lived off her until she threw them out. Sylvia was never without a lighted cigarette in her ebony holder, which she wielded like a baton. Her hair flew as if it were wings, and a small mole by the side of her nose made her look serious even when she was joking. When she trained her owlish brown eyes at them, producers found themselves blabbering nonsense in story conferences just to avoid her look, and Sylvia could win approval for a plot point by asking, with faux innocence, “Can you think of a better way to do this?” riveting the executive until he stammered, “Ah, really, no, I can’t.”

“It’s the dues of youth,” Sylvia said, “that’s all you’re paying.” I told her I’d been sure I could at least mix a little with people here, but I honestly didn’t know how to be one of them. “No one,” she said, “is one of them until they notice you and they don’t notice you until you do something noticeable, good or bad. Just the fact you’re here means Mossy has seen something about you. That’s enough, Wallflower.”

We both left the den and Sylvia rejoined her date, the infamous drunk and puffy braggart Jamieson McPhatter. “Thought you’d stood me up have another drink will you look at that fairy in his tights did you know Selznick wants to see me,” I heard the pompous McPhatter spew as I wondered why Sylvia Solomon, engaging enough in her way, wasted her time with that bullfrog. When I knew her well enough to ask what she saw in Lord Jamieson, Sylvia said she wanted to collaborate on his next script since they wouldn’t let a woman write Nelson at Trafalgar all by herself and he’d already muscled his way onto the project. She also knew McPhatter would fall into a stupor and she wouldn’t have to sleep with him, only drive him home and call a taxi. But that was later. For now, I was discarded.

In the center of the room, the directors resembled a clot of playground bullies, bullies wearing gold cufflinks engraved with castles or racehorses. They told each other stories about the vanity of stars, the stupidity of producers, who they’d bring out from Broadway to be in their next picture. The more pensive ones were out-blustered by the others. Although they couldn’t begin their work until we finished ours, I did not hear them mention writers. I liked pictures better before these guys became the dictators. That’s why I’m an irrelevant discard.

In the midst of the clot was a tall slender man, youngish but with a creased high forehead from which close-cropped hair was beginning to recede. Nils Matheus Maynard had come to Jubilee more recently than I, but unlike me his reputation preceded him. Listening to Largo Buchalter, a particularly noisy blowhard, Nils reached into his pocket and pulled out a brass ball. Making no show—I noticed him only because the blowhard’s voice attracted my attention as he broadcast his conquest of a rising actress—Nils placed the small ball between the thumb and index finger of his right hand. Without a word, as if he were fidgeting for his own amusement, he made the ball become two, three, then four balls, each held between a different pair of fingers.

“Attaboy Nils, let’s see what you’re up to,” said handsome, dark Frank Capra, interrupting Largo Buchalter’s monologue. Buchalter glowered at Capra, understood he had held the floor too long, and yielded resentfully. “Oh sure, Houdini, wow us,” he said.

“No,” Nils said, “I could never be confused with the incomparable escape meister, but once upon a time, as some of you know, I was myself the sorcerer’s apprentice.” As he spoke, Nils had pulled a deck of cards from his jacket pocket and had each of the other directors pick a card.

“What’s the secret of magic, Nils Matheus?” someone asked Nils, who was often referred to by both his first and middle names. Others had now swelled the group.

“Stupid question,” said the bloviating Largo Buchalter, unwilling to cede the floor entirely. “What he does is go around fooling people, that’s all.”

“Not fooling,” Nils said quietly, “I hope amazing and delighting them. Same in magic as in pictures or stories. First, please them. After that, you can do anything.”

“What pulled you from magic to pictures anyway?” another director asked.

Nils Matheus Maynard was an established headlining magician before he ever made movies. He began his training with Harry Houdini himself (or the rabbi’s son Erich Weiss, as the cognoscenti preferred) when Houdini was in the last weary spiral of his illustrious career. He had done everything from swallowing needles to falling into Boston harbor while handcuffed and locked in a safe to an impossible jailbreak. As a boy Nils had been taken by his mother to the escapade in Boston, and he became a Houdini worshipper at that moment, the moreso because of a condition that denied Nils any hope of emulating the daring physical feats of the master.

Nils’s mother Bruna was a von Bickenheim of Bavaria, with distinguished roots in universities and the discipline of mathematics. The family had been compromised, Nils told me when I got to know him, first by her emigration to America and then, more grievously, by her marriage to Nils’s soft, shiftless father, Rufus Maynard, an indifferent sailor and sailmaker from Gloucester, Massachusetts. Their second son was sickly, a bleeder, and it was because of Bruna. She had an uncle with severe hemophilia, and she knew she was the source of Nils’s disease.

Hemophilia, with no known cause or cure, displays itself with serious bleeding only in males yet is directly inherited only from females (in rare cases, females may have mild hemorrhages). A hemophiliac father will have no sons who bleed, but all his daughters will be carriers. A carrier mother will have half carrier daughters and half hemophiliac sons. When Nils was a boy hemophilia was still called the disease of kings, largely because it afflicted both the English and Russian royal families who, as it happened, had intermarried. In the superstition of the day, a family with a hemophiliac was sometimes thought to be in the grip of a diabolical possession. The blood transfusions Nils needed were regarded with suspicion, and his mother was ashamed whenever she had to take her son to the hospital in Boston.

Bruna von Bickenheim Maynard was so horrified by her son’s condition that she fled back to Bavaria from time to time. This left Nils and his non-bleeding brother with their frequently unemployed father whose chief pleasures were Scotch whiskey and swapping tales with other old salts in the sailmaking lofts of Gloucester.

Coming and going in Nils’s life, his mother was alternately overbearingly protective and a deserter. Nils obeyed her rigidly, but this had no influence on her abandonments. Joining a small group of parents with hemophiliac sons, Frau von Bickenheim Maynard encountered a woman from South Braintree, Evelina Tedeschio, whose son Mario was the same age as Nils. Nils and Mario played together during group meetings, but since South Braintree is on the other side of Boston from Gloucester they saw each other only once a month when parents gathered to discuss ways to handle their bleeding, and blood-needy, sons. Mario liked to hit his mother, knowing she couldn’t hit him back. Evelina Tedeschio disclaimed any sense of guilt or anger by asserting she felt honored that God had favored her with the responsibility to make her son an inspiration for others. “Nonsense,” said another mother, “my line is cursed and so is yours. All of us here gave birth to vampires.”

The hostile Mario became the obedient Nils’s best friend, and between their monthly visits they wrote letters. Nils told Mario he wanted to find a formula for curing hemophilia; Mario wrote back he wanted to make the whole world hemophiliac so people would know what the suffering felt like. Evelina Tedeschio made her son a virtual prisoner inside a virtual shrine to his illness, pillows and pads on every piece of furniture, high locks on the doors to prevent the boy from wandering. When he was eleven, Mario escaped from the Tedeschio home in South Braintree and made his way by trolley and bus to Gloucester. He waited until dark before tapping on Nils’s window.

The two boys were missing for five days—Nils’s mother was away and his father was mostly drinking—and the only person to panic was Evelina Tedeschio. This meant the police looked only on the South Shore; meanwhile Nils and Mario found their way to Lowell, well north of Boston, where they hired themselves into a shirtwaist factory and took milled cotton to the women who transformed it into cloth. If any of the thousands of needles in the factory had poked either of the boys they’d have been in serious trouble, but they were careful. Exposed gears were another hazard, and poor ventilation left the air filled with cotton fibers. Some of the workers, all women, were in the early stages of tuberculosis and often had to spit onto the floor, which endangered everyone else. Yet Nils told me he never felt healthier in his entire childhood than during those few stolen days in the textile mill when he was treated like everyone else. The jig wasn’t up until a watchman found the boys sleeping in the mill. Nils wasn’t allowed to see Mario again.

To Nils most of childhood was combat, and most of his bleeding was internal. His hemophilia was of a relatively moderate variety, yet when he played with other boys he was sure to come home with grossly swollen and excruciatingly painful joints. Knees, elbows, ankles, wrists were the worst. A contact sport sent him into agony as his blood flowed eagerly, inside his joints, to any bruised area. When he had to miss school because of pain, Nils read books about magic. “Anything to escape,” he told me. He was better with his hands than his sailmaking father, and he could make rabbits disappear for his dazzled school chums, some of whose parents thought it was the work of Satan. Nils had no respect for his father and something approaching hatred for his mother.

In 1914, when Nils was fifteen, he won a sleight-of-hand contest that gave him six weeks as a junior assistant to Houdini. Unlike Houdini’s other assistants, all older and more experienced, Nils knew he could never become an escape artist or contort his body in any fashion. He practiced with cards, birds, ribbons and scarves up to ten hours a day. He described this as a preference, never telling Houdini or the other assistants about his hemophilia, which had begun to abate but would never permit him to twist himself into the human pretzel that was routine for escape artists.

From Houdini, Nils learned to make objects disappear and reappear elsewhere, to take the audience into his confidence, give them the impression they knew a trick as well as the performer, then with a whisk and a blinding hand-eye movement leave them astounded at how utterly they had been deceived. Nils told me a magician is really an actor playing the part of a magician. He acted his apprentice part so well that at the end of six weeks Houdini asked Nils to stay on as part of his retinue. Houdini liked to say great tricks are like unsolved crimes, and now Nils was learning to commit them.

Houdini took Nils to Hollywood where the peerless magician made several silent films, all disappointments. Chaplin tried to give Houdini suggestions to make his pictures more believable. Houdini insisted he had only to replicate what he did on a stage, but audiences did not buy this on the screen. For Nils it was all going to school.

After several years Nils felt he’d learned enough, and the master was becoming self-destructive. Houdini kept himself locked in a coffin under water for over an hour, which left him ill for days afterward, and he began doing something Nils found eerie. Some weeks Houdini would spend all his time exposing fraudulent mediums and spiritualists. “This was holy work to Houdini,” Nils said, “but to me it was breaking the proscenium. I love sham. It’s why I became a magician. Audiences love it. It takes them away from the deeper shams and disasters of their lives.”

Within a year after going on his own, Nils was filling theaters from San Francisco to Savannah, seeing his name grow larger on posters. He could make anything vanish on one side of the stage and rematerialize on the other; he could cut one woman not into two but into six women, which brought audiences to their feet. He introduced himself theatrically, almost in a trance as he chanted his spell: “Hear me, O Spirits, in my torment. Numerals are the invisible coverings of human beings. We ask you to release us through numbers. Let every rope or strap, every knot be broken, every form of matter change its shape and location. Let identity itself multiply, for I am Nils Maynard but also Matheus von Bickenheim.”

Having borrowed the name of his despised mother, Nils would begin his tricks while explaining he needed his mother’s noble heritage to invoke the powerful forces that would help him perform magic. The ancient von Bickenheim attachment to mathematics at Heidelberg resurfaced in a way his forefathers wouldn’t have predicted but would recognize. He would turn one dove into four, one handkerchief into ten, and again and again one woman into six. He took a few prisoners from Houdini: Nils could make a trumpet leave one table and arrive instantly on another playing “Stars and Stripes Forever,” and he could throw four ringing alarm clocks into the air, make them vanish and reappear hanging from watch chains on the opposite side of the stage. When he had worked his way up to playing New York, Detroit, and Chicago in the mid 1920s, Nils was making eight thousand dollars a week and pocketing virtually all of it. He was free. He never spoke to Houdini again, nor would he see his mother, even when she tried to come backstage in Boston.

Nils tired of repeating himself. Unlike Houdini he was not a great showman craving adulation nor would his disease allow him to top himself with physical feats. But there was another form of magic Nils was certain he could do.

The magic of a magician was mundane compared with the magic of film—what is a severed rope restored to a single strand or a vanishing dove when stacked against prehistoric monsters or a leap from the wing of one airplane to another?—which is why Nils became a moviemaker. “Magicians like to believe they can defy the Creator by doing things no human has ever done,” Nils said, “but a filmmaker becomes the Creator by constructing his own world. It just takes him a little longer. Six days becomes twelve weeks or so.” Instead of imitating his former hero, Nils used the magic of the screen itself—cross-cutting, montage, close-ups, fade-ins, dissolves, special effects—to make people howl, to scare and amuse and reassure them, to make them weep over the salvation of an orphan or the redemption of a scapegrace. He began making pictures in the last days of the silents and managed a seamless transition to talkies.

After a successful adaptation of a hit play, Nils fumbled and made a few attempts at what he intended as intellectual pictures. An explorer goes to Tibet and finds his journey is philosophical rather than geographical. The dictator of a small country begins with ideals and is corrupted by power and privilege until his son, home from college in America, literally does not recognize his grossly bloated, bemedalled and brutal father. This was a decent moment but the picture itself, which Nils made for Jubilee, was a failure, stumbling over its own pretensions to political significance and moralizing. Louella Parsons, among others, brought Nils back to earth: “One of the brightest boys in our constellation of directors,” she wrote, “likes to go around town proclaiming that if pictures can talk they might as well say something. Fine and dandy, but he should remember the ringing declaration from the founding fathers of filmdom—if you want to send a message, take it to Western Union.” That was a message Nils heeded. A long time later Mossy told me had planted the item by calling Parsons himself. True or not, from then on Nils made entertainments.

When Nils finished disclosing his path into pictures to his fellow directors, Largo Buchalter, who hated to have anyone else hold forth, could only say, “Well la-di-da.” Nils realized Buchalter was about to start a new story about himself, belittling others. “I think,” Nils concluded slowly as he looked Buchalter in the eye, “that what meant the most for me in terms of freedom was to be famous and rich and still so young.” The bully braggart in the director’s cluster had suddenly been outbullied and outbragged. Nils wasn’t quite through. “Frank,” he said to Capra, “will you give me back my four of clubs?” He went around the circle naming the card each director had picked earlier. When he finished, Nils handed the deck to Largo Buchalter and told him to keep it. “Just in case you think it’s marked.” To me, Nils was virtuous glamour.

A royal moment. The prince of melody descended the stairs. Dapper, double breasted in blue serge, dark hair lightly brilliantined. Teet Beale was at last intimidated—no ta-ra-ra-booms for this guy, any lyric would fall dead at his feet. Beale humbly bowed and said, “It’s an honor to have you here, Mr. Berlin.” Irving Berlin nodded with a wisp of a smile and went to greet Palmyra. “Mr. Berlin,” she said, “I wish I were your sister in song, but I’m only your fourth cousin at least twice removed.” “Music is music, my dear,” said Irving Berlin, “and I’m happy to have you anywhere in the family.”

Blinded by my betters, I was wondering why Mossy was a phantom at his own party when suddenly I was slammed on the back. It was not Mossy, who did not do such things. Seaton Hackley, Mossy’s henchman who played his part in Joey Jouet’s final hours, was praising the Doll’s House work I turned in that afternoon, which felt like the previous century. “A humdinger script,” he called it, forgetting it was only a treatment. He must have received it from Gershon Lidowitz already—Littlewits himself—and shoveled it up to Mossy, from whom he may have detected a passing blink of approval. “Love the way you solved the third act. Always had a soft spot for Torvald myself. Nice to give him the drinking problem, automatically makes him more interesting and justifies the wife leaving home, even taking the kiddies to her mother’s while old Torvie promises to get off the sauce. She’s not really abandoning her home that way. Leaves us with morality in the saddle and the prospect of a reunited family. You think Fred MacMurray is ready for Torvie?” Maybe, but he’s not ready for Garbo, I didn’t dare say. Garbo was the star they wanted for Nora though I’d heard Pammy was hoping she’d get the part.

Hackley’s praise made me proud, with no inkling of how much more Ibsen would hate me than the other writers who did nothing worse than change his ending while I had triumphantly destroyed everything he meant in the play. I looked around for Lidowitz. Not here. He somehow didn’t rate, yet I did. My moment of strut. Woozily, I took out my car keys and jingled them. Just to make some noise.

Haloed beneath a chandelier, with the self-possession of a nested starling, Pammy greeted people alone. Her honey-gold hair was now in a twirled mound at the top of her head—she re-coiffed in the powder room?—while the green diaphanous gown was both French and ancient Greek. She was classical and romantic. Was it possible?—yes, she’d begun working her way toward me. She must have heard about my coup at the studio; surely Seaton Hackley wouldn’t have praised me without a nod from Mossy, a nod that had made the rounds. A disobedient strand of her upswept hair, straying from the rest of her coiffure, caught more light at the back of her neck. What would she say to me? Or I to her? Why could she come to me like this but I couldn’t approach her? Or could I? The way of the pecking order: a junior screenwriter speaks when spoken to, ready with a bon mot. I wasn’t.

I’d say, “You’re looking even more ravishing than usual.” Naw, that’s what a flit would tell her. Likewise I couldn’t say how much I loved her in The Many Lives of Theodosia, a negligible effort by all concerned. Palmyra was getting nearer, greeting friends but drawing unrelentingly closer to me. How about just going with “Mossy really knows how to live, ha ha, you should see the main house.” Death. I was terminally abashed. Here she is. In two seconds I’ll have to say something. No, oh.

In the last tenth of an instant, like a car swerving to avoid a crash, Palmyra angled—she had almost bumped into me—to kiss and embrace Simone Swan Bluett, who did her costumes on Autumn Nocturne. “Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight,” said Simone to Palmyra. Had Pammy been heading for her the whole time, then, or had she changed her mind as she approached me, deciding late in her sashay that her dresser was worth her time and affection while I was not?

“I told you, it’s just dues,” said the reappeared Sylvia Solomon, patting my shoulder. Maternally, sisterly? I turned to her and said, “It’s discouraging and I’m embarrassed that you noticed.” “Look,” she said, “be thankful you don’t have to sleep with anyone to get around this town. It wasn’t so easy for me. Though come to think of it, it wouldn’t hurt if you found your way into the right bed here and there.”

How do you get into the right bed anyway, I did not ask as we were joined by Yancey Ballard and other writers. The angular Yeatsman stooped to my eye level. “Feeling isolated? It’s good for the soul. I myself look forward to becoming a sixty-year-old smiling public man some distant day.” We screenwriters huddled, indeed grumbled, in a corner filled with a reproduction of Rodin’s Thinker and another of a Greek god entwined around a goddess. Some of these writers were Hollywood notables making three thousand or more a week, some were notorious, some disappointed, some permanently hopeful, most suspecting they would be better people if they did something else. Novelists, playwrights, journalists: they’d all had what they now thought of as honest, if not sufficiently gainful, toil. Now they were in harness, overpaid, feeling they were debasing themselves before illiterates prior to being replaced by another of their species who would, in turn, also be replaced. Or else they were trying to be hired to be overpaid, debased, and replaced. Self-respect was not an attribute many of them had in excess.

A cocky thickset writer junior even to me, Mark Darrow, began babbling, perhaps from nervousness or drink. “I always start with a twist, a guy’s told he has a fatal disease, or it’s the night before a battle,” he said, “then I decide who should be in that plot point—a thief, surgeon, bunch of salesmen looking for dames.” Mark’s wife grabbed his elbow and said, “Honey, please, these men have so much more experience.” But Yeatsman said, “That’s fine, fine, but I like to start with someone I’m interested in, flawed of course, I think what’s improvable about him, then I go further and think only what’s provable. When I get to the provable I can start to write, and things will happen to him.” “No, no, no, that’s entirely wrong,” said Mark Darrow as if he were his famous uncle Clarence rebutting the prosecution in a courtroom. “You have to have the gimmick first,” he went on, “like a coat hook so you can hang everything on it and the good guys—”

But now Yeatsman interrupted, having heard enough of Darrow’s nonsense. “You know what’s too bad?” he said. “What’s too bad is the kids of this country being brought up by our pictures to believe crime doesn’t pay or you shouldn’t have sex till you’re married, or—” And he was in turn interrupted by Sylvia Solomon, who said, “Now here’s what we could do, folks, that the Hays Office morality police in charge of protecting youth from reality couldn’t object to—we could make a picture about a hateful Hollywood executive, excuse the redundancy, who throws a party where everyone present loathes him for one reason or another and finally he is murdered while the party is still in progress—”

Yeatsman said, “And after the cheering stops, for the rest of the movie Bill Powell and Myrna Loy have to figure out who did it, and no one wants them to solve the crime.”

At that very moment, cued by Sylvia and Yeatsman, Amos Zangwill descended the stairs into our midst and promenaded his ballroom. “Speaking of the unholy ghost,” said Sylvia. “Cuchulain himself,” said Yeatsman.

Decades later I still see him entering now in his dark suit with his half smile, regal, not arrogant. Where did that smile come from, an executioner’s smile but also the grinning rictus of his dispatched victim? Trim, almost small, creating a lagoon of space one could violate only at the peril of being repelled like a clumsy pirate hurled to the sharks off a galleon. A small cortege followed as Mossy nodded to his guests.

“What a night!” Largo Buchalter bellowed as Mossy passed the directors. “We’re all having the time of our lives, Mossy!” “Glad you’ve been elected spokesman, Largo,” Mossy said as he smiled at Nils Matheus and Capra but not at Buchalter.

Mark Darrow, drunkenly on the make, broke from the writers’ kennel. His wife tried to pull him back to safety, but he elbowed her aside. He seized what he must have felt was the main chance as Mossy passed an elaborately framed Picasso drawing. In the drawing a male abstraction was inserting part of himself into an opening in a female abstraction. “What a genius he is with a phallic symbol, isn’t he Mossy?” Darrow ventured. He pronounced it fay-lick. Yeatsman groaned; there was too much silence in the room and everyone had heard.

“Phallic it is,” Mossy replied with the correct pronunciation, “symbol it’s not.”

“Oh sure, AZ,” said Darrow, obviously unaware that Mossy hated being called by his initials as if he were LB Mayer. Mossy’s temperature seemed to rise a little as he considered “AZ” and how he might discipline its user; we were seeing the studio head as padrone reproving one of his villagers. “I’ll tell you what is a phallic symbol, Marky”—“Oh god,” Sylvia whispered, “he only does that to your name if he hates you”—“when you stick your pencil in your mouth, Marky, and rotate it the way you do in story conferences so it blackens your lips and looks as if you’d really like to be sucking someone’s cock instead of yessing my every belch, that is when the pencil becomes a phallic symbol. Am I right, Mel?”

This last was tossed over Mossy’s shoulder to the family psychoanalyst, Melvin Baron, who followed in Mossy’s train. Dr. Baron obediently nodded as fast as he could. “Yes absolutely definitely, Mossy, I couldn’t have put it … ” But Mossy slashed him with a gesture and moved on. Mark Darrow faded wordless into the burled woodwork, smiling bravely as he may have imagined Sydney Carton did on the steps to the guillotine.

“See?” Sylvia said leaning toward me. “At the next party you’ll be welcomed by all as one of the happy band of brothers and sisters present for the execution of Mark Darrow. While young Mark himself will be lucky if he ever gets invited after this to the opening of a tin can. Did you catch the glare Marky’s little wife gave him?”

By this time Mossy had again disappeared upstairs into his library with King Vidor and Nils Matheus Maynard. There had been talk that the directors might try to form a guild as the writers were doing, and we all knew Mossy would want to head off any such insubordination. He was vaguely apolitical on the right, but many writers called him fascistic, an adjective we threw around promiscuously when discussing studio heads.

With Mossy upstairs, Palmyra reigned. The producers fell over themselves courting her for their next pictures. She was able to fly away, a brightly feathered songbird, telling them all they were too kind.

Teet Beale, the crier, announced midnight supper, “Ladies first, s’il vous plaît.”

As wives and actresses streamed past us toward the buffet table, a writer next to me began to swear. “Fuck it all, what I hate most here are the women’s perfumes,” said Poor Jim Bicker, a former hobo who sold a magazine story to Jubilee and was now on his third screenplay. He made eight hundred a week, more than twice my salary, but he still had the nickname Poor from his days riding the rails. Even tonight in his relative prosperity, he had torn cuffs, unpressed pants, and he looked as if he had just arrived from a brawl, which was a possibility. “You could use a little education,” he said to me.

“Why the perfume?” I asked.

“I prefer the body stench of bathless hoboes,” Poor Jim answered more to his highball glass than to me. “Yeah, a hobo’s honest smell is better than these women with their artificial scents all swimming together like rare tropical fish in this dazzle of a tank. Like to take a pick-ax to the tank, let all the water run out. They couldn’t survive without their privilege. Their scents and the sloppy paints on their faces cost more than I saw in a month before I was bought out and became part of this vulgarity. Some say they’re Reds, can you beat that?” Poor Jim threw up his hands. “Maybe I’ll fuck me one of them later.” He sniffed, scorning and lusting after the extravagantly adorned women.

The Canadian director of Westerns, Walter Heatherington, was telling an ancient man with blue hair, who was addressed as Monsieur Le Comte, about the death of his best friend as they advanced along the line in France in 1918. “My mate Lorne was pushing along in the mud next to me one moment, and the next his head was at my wrist, blown clear of his trunk, and the sergeant told me to keep moving.”

“Ah, mon Dieu,” said the very old blue-haired man, who had been involved with the Lumières in devising early film projectors and cameras, “De temps en temps I think all of us should have died in the trenches. In my own first war with the Bosch, in 1870, I was wounded in Alsace and they thought I would die of blood poisoning—how you say gangrene in my leg. I was evacuated to Lyon to die in hospital. A nurse was posted there, une jeune fille, comment s’appellait-elle, ah Danielle. I recall how she brought me around when I could lie only on my back and she came in the night to wash me again in my helplessness. Danielle’s spécialité de la maison was the upside down backward squat, to this day there are mornings when I think of nothing but the muscles in her back as she rose and fell. Danielle broke my heart and left the nursing to become a nun. Then I wish I died in Alsace. But it never gets any easier, relations sexuelles, does it?”

I asked M. Le Comte what that was.

“Call it the seduction, my boy. Half the people here are working so hard hoping they will be coucher with the other half by two a.m., and not a few will succeed. Some of us will be dead, still aching with desire in our final breaths, dying to love a little more as we die. Meanwhile, I recollect Danielle. Long dead herself, of course, unless she is a retired mother superior. Sex and death, they play with each other, unwilling partners who always win and always lose. You think the cinema is about sex, but it is really all about death, and someday you’ll see why.”

I didn’t, though, not for many years, until I arrived at my own version of what he was saying. All the people in the movies of his early days with the Lumières, like most of us at Mossy’s party, those who wrote and directed and produced the pictures, and especially those who acted in them, are dead. Le Comte himself is of course long gone. Looking at old movies is simply looking at dead people, at death itself. The ancient French film pioneer was prophesying that motion pictures were going to last even though their makers would not. Wedded to death: what an art form.

“The shock of the war behind, the pull of a war to come,” said M. Le Comte. “Alors, we are always between two magnets.”

“Ta-ra-ra, Darryl Zanuck, He puts us in a panic, The whole town’s in his box, Whether he’s at Warner’s or Fox.”

“Monsieur Zanuck enters the fray,” said M. Le Comte, “your Napoleon I believe.”

Teet Beale was quickly silenced and a clamor arose for Palmyra to sing. Mossy came out of his library to stand at the crest of the six steps leading down into his ballroom. Esther Leah Zangwill, a compact bundle of nerves who had spent much of the evening ordering around the kitchen staff, made an appearance beside her husband. Mossy was a bullet of a man with eyes that did not see so much as penetrate their object. Esther Leah fidgeted, never leaving anything—a piece of furniture, her hairdo, a child’s clothing—alone. When a writer asked Mossy, “How’s Fussy?” it meant he knew Esther Leah well and was in Mossy’s good graces due to a script that was shootable. “She tolerates me,” Mossy would answer. “No one knows why.” If Esther Leah found a servant smoking in the kitchen or heard an underling criticize Mossy, although she did both of these things herself, repeatedly, the offender was banished.

Mossy did not announce that Palmyra would sing. He only moved his eyes toward the piano. If you looked away from the vacant baby grand for a moment and then looked back, you would see a studio musician had materialized at the keyboard.

Palmyra smiled her faintly one-sided smile and proceeded to the piano. At parties earlier in her career she had scandalously added blue lyrics that could never be in a movie or on a record. She’d had a hit in 1932 with a song called “Give Me a Chance,” in which the last chorus had lines ending with “chance,” “romance” and “passionate trance.” At a party given by Marion Davies in the Oceanhouse beach mansion William Randolph Hearst had built for her, after the aged and curiously shockable publisher had gone upstairs to bed (curious since he lived openly with his mistress), Pammy stepped to the microphone and uncorked an altered last stanza:

You’re here to pitch,

I’m here to catch;

Where I itch

You know how to scratch,

So honey if you’ll give me a chance,

I’ll take hold of that thing in your pants;

I’ll stroke it and I’ll suck it,

I’ll sit on it and I’ll fuck it

Till I leave you in an unaccustomed trance.

This pretty much brought down the Oceanhouse, and by noon on Monday the whole town was trying to quote Pammy’s words. Unfortunately for her, the song had been recorded by a young reporter for Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner who wanted to curry favor with the chief. Hearst, too furious even to reprimand his mistress, had the recording sent to his friend J. Edgar Hoover with a note: “This one has Red sympathies. Let’s cool her off.” The head of the FBI office in Los Angeles paid a visit to Mossy at Jubilee. “Don’t bother to get scratches on your record by playing it on my phonograph,” Mossy told the G-man, “because I was at the party myself.” But what he said to Pammy was, “They’re threatening to go to the Legion of Decency with it, Walter Winchell, the churches. Bad luck, but no more union garbage and Red meetings for you, young lady, or your career will be over. They’ll deport you as an alien, and they’ll try to take your daughter away. They’ll keep her here. They’re not kidding about deportation.”

“Whaaaat? Take Millie? You’re joking.”

“They’ll claim anyone who sings songs like that is an unfit mother. Period.”

For the next two years labor organizers complained they couldn’t get Palmyra Millevoix at their rallies anymore. The more sophisticated among them shrugged. “She’s sold out like the rest of ’em. Works for the fascist Zangwill. ’Nuff said.”

Mossy’s party was entering its climactic phase when Pammy reached the piano, where the accompanist from the Jubilee orchestra offered a few chords to gain silence. “I came to the California of unlimited hopes,” Pammy began before the talking died completely. “Most of you have helped me and none of you have hurt me—much.” Appreciative titters. Nils Matheus Maynard clinked his glass with a spoon until the room was quiet. Mossy came down all the stairs but one, which he needed to stand on in order to see above heads to Pammy; sensitive about his height—five and a half feet—he also didn’t want to stay at the top of the stairs like the Pope on his balcony. Pammy smiled across the room at him. “My employer, our genial and easygoing host” (chuckles from the braver guests) “has asked me for a song. He is a skeptical optimist, while I remain a cheerful pessimist. The best we can do to keep the wolf away is have some fun and thank Amos Zangwill for the evening.” Scattered applause for Mossy. “Times change, don’t they?” Palmyra was keeping time now with her hips as the piano vamped a few notes. “In the Twenties we had plenty, In the Thirties it’s all gone, But in the Thirties we got dirty, And we dance from dark till dawn. Oh my heart will jump for dancing, For dancing till we fall; That’s when I want romancing, Please take me to the ball.”

“Give us ‘Lucky Rendezvous,’ Pammy” someone cried. “No, ‘Moonbeams,’” yelled someone else. Pammy was savoring the wait, roasting those chestnuts I’d described in my overwrought press release, until she had just the anticipation level she wanted.

“But the country around us,” Pammy went on, “is not dancing because it can’t even stand up. I’m not trying to raise money or pleading any cause. I just want to say my sense of justice, which has been asleep for several years, is awake again.”

Mossy looked at his toes while the Lefties in the room clapped and everyone else waited. An odd occasion, I thought, for Palmyra to put her social conscience on exhibit, but then entertainers are exhibitionists by nature. She had the audience she wanted, the most visible and powerful members of the industry. Sylvia Solomon poked me in the ribs. “Hooray for Millevoix,” I said to her, “and watch out Hollywood.” “I’d put it the other way around,” she whispered, “especially watch out for the big guys on the playground.”

“We are all dreamers,” Pammy said to the room, “or we wouldn’t be writing, directing, acting, composing, or producing, would we?” (Sylvia whispered again, “At least one person here puts writing first.”) “We dare make dreams come true. But when you gain the dream you lose the dream. The song I’m going to sing is about lovers who have to part, their tristesse. But it’s also about my songs themselves. When I have a song in me it is a happy full feeling because it’s still inside me. When I release it, I’m as empty and sad as anyone waving farewell or remembering any time past that we cherish.”

The piano trilled, and here’s some of what Palmyra sang:

I can’t do a thing when I have to say goodbye,

Since the word all alone 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.

I’ve made a sandwich ham and cheddarly

Just for Gertrude Ederle;

The tickle in my nose has felt

A breeze for Franklin Roosevelt.

You can take me way back to where time began,

To the east of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan;

But search as I may and try as I try

I just haven’t noticed the good in goodbye.

Pammy had written the song for a nightclub croon in Jubilee’s Reno Weekend, which needed to acknowledge and relieve the self-pity of its three divorcees, only one of whom had by that point in the picture found a cowboy. Years later Harold Arlen played with the same theme, and the song became “What’s Good About Goodbye.” I still prefer Palmyra’s, but then I would. She finished with “So please don’t you ask me or I’ll have to lie; I never have found where’s the good in goodbye.”

The wanton secret of motion pictures is that everyone connected with them is a starstruck fan. Yeatsman allowed himself a whistle, as did some of the producers. Mossy was clapping from the top of the stairs, to which he had returned. A shout of “Encore, je vous en prie” from Tutor Beedleman brought a smile from Pammy, but she had finished singing for her supper. She was swept up by her forthcoming costar Trent Amberlyn, joined by her best friend Teresa Blackburn, who was just starting to win good parts herself, and Teresa’s brother Stubby Blackburn, a shortstop for the Los Angeles Angels in the Pacific Coast League. Together they led Pammy away from the piano.

Even though some guests were going home, others were still arriving. The alert Teet Beale spotted big game. “Ta-ra-ra, Here’s a neat trick, Descending now’s La Dietrich, Blesses us with mirth and fun, Shines brighter than the sun.” Enter Marlene grandly. “Between her usual brace of flits,” said Tutor Beedleman. Dietrich’s wide-eyed smile enfolded the room and no one in it. High-waisted black slacks making her legs even longer, an ivory blouse forming a V so expansive its first button was below her self-assured breasts. Boyish, womanly, naughty and haughty, freed from the rigid grip of gender. Why she lighted on me I don’t know; I must have resembled the cringing courtier I was. The low voice, the open throat: “Can you take me, Darlink, to Mr. Zangvill.”

Leaving all the men and half the women with their tongues hanging—though I heard one actress say to another, “I’ll bet that dame poses in her sleep”—I escorted Miss D back up the stairs to the library. She took my arm. No ceremony with her host once I’d opened the library door. “Mossy, ve must talk, ve must weally sit down mit each udder.” I shuffled out of the library along with Baringer Donovan, the Warner’s producer. “Ten more minutes,” Donovan said to me as we rejoined the rest of the party, “shit, five more minutes, and I’ve had a deal with Jubilee so I could tell Jack Warner on Monday to go hump one of Zanuck’s polo ponies.” “Tough luck,” I said. “Nothing to do with luck,” he said, “it was that hun bitch’s timing. Say, who are you anyway?”

Down I went another fathom. What hopes I’d had when I’d come! How they were dashed! Pondering my exclusion from the kingdom of notability, I tried to convince myself it was temporary. I thought about the fame of a hero like Charles Lindbergh who had earned it (then paid for it so dearly with his infant son’s kidnapping and death) and the residual fame of the has-beens like Anita Billow who simply moved about in her cocoon of repute. Billow, who was here at the party, had been a silent star whose Polish accent (née Bilowitsky) kept her not only from achieving talkie stardom but even from getting small parts. She was a somebody relegated to nobody status by technology. Unable to make the necessary adjustments to her thickly accented English, unlike the sultry Dietrich or the whispery Garbo, she sounded like a truck driver with a sore throat. For Anita Billow, fame was lifelong access. She simply went around looking ravishing, nursing her legend, saying she didn’t miss acting. For the public, each kind of fame dissolved into each other kind, soothing them with voyeurism and wish fulfillment. In Hollywood, fame became a kind of magnetic north, and those whose fame lasted would merely be the famous who embodied the public’s more transcendent hopes. The stars’ glamour surfaced as the mysterious flash of lightning extended indefinitely.

The directors did their late-night hammering. “Actors are basically crazy, can’t let the inmates run the asylum.” “Piece of practical advice, never fuck a starlet if you can fuck a star.” “Thirty-foot-high image of passion—audiences think this is reality and the world outside the theater is an illusion. Know what, they’re right.” “Escape, escape, escape. Eggheads knock it, I live for it.” “Naw, gimme a tough guy fighting in an alley, a broad upstairs in a rooming house, they meet in a breadline and I’m cooking with gas.”

I looked out the window and pictured Father Junipero Serra creating a mission on this site in the 1700s, on the ground above Beverly Hills. He would have put a holy place here. The Indians converted, farmed, carved their crosses, built a few huts around a chapel, sickened with European diseases, prayed. Father Serra made their faith his cause. The bones of the Indians and their Spanish confessors and conquistadors might be buried beneath the Zangwill palace and gardens. This vortex where I was sinking had once been a mission. A mission it was again.

“What a pleasure—Owen Jant, isn’t it?” I was returned to the party by a voice followed by a hand on my arm. My hostess, Esther Leah Zangwill, gentled me back to the occasion though I realized my gin-soaked reverie had canted me somewhat and I tried to pull myself together. Before I knew anything I was saying, “Me? A pleasure? I couldn’t be, I don’t even know what I’m doing here, sorry.” And she said, “Think I do? But that’s how I am most of the time, not knowing where or why, mustn’t let it worry us.” She shrugged, and looking into her importuning eyes I saw I’d done something right by being mistakenly honest. “Not knowing,” she said, “and being worried about that, then not caring.” Esther Leah gave the impression of looking on the proceedings with an alternating current of disbelief and resignation. How many of these men owed their careers to her husband, how many of these women had he slept with? Adept at hiding both shame and love, Esther Leah was short, an oval-faced woman with large dark eyes, too prominent a chin, a warm Mediterranean complexion. “You’ll get used to this,” she said. “It’s like what I imagine weightlessness is. Look for meaning, you’ll go nuts. Look for a little pleasure, you’ll find some. Soon it will be a burden to feel any other way.” Esther Leah patted my shoulder and was off hostessing.

Palmyra had found her way, after many detours, back to Rolfe Sedan, the actor she’d come in with. She whispered to him. Did her lips brush his ear?

With no Mossy to thank, guests kissed or double-kissed Esther Leah on their way to the parking valets. I knew Rolfe Sedan could not be important in the life of Palmyra Millevoix—at best a cipher, not unlike me, just so she wouldn’t have to show up alone—and this left me grateful. The upsweep of her hair now made her taller, more regal, than when it splashed onto her shoulders as it did in most publicity shots. Had anyone photographed her this way, and could I filch a copy? Wait, why was she patting Rolfe Sedan on the shoulder and moving toward the stairs by herself? She was going home alone too? Losses surrounded me, yet redemption was at hand. In our mutual solitude my spirit would fly to her.

I had not at first heard the low laugh coming from the open library door at the top of the stairs. In a moment Amos Zangwill and Marlene Dietrich were descending as if leading a stately procession. The low laugh again, from Marlene. “Mossy darlink, you haf giffen me eggsackly vut I need.” “Well,” he said, “it’s a two way street, Marlene.” “No, but eggzackly!” she said, clutching an empty martini glass like a weapon. “On vun little cocktail I am as you say loaded. Bad boy.” Mossy shrugged and smiled.

From nowhere the two little chaperones Marlene came in with were alongside Pammy at the bottom of the stairs. “Boys, I see you in za morning,” Dietrich said as she dismissed what Tutor Beedleman called her body doubles. “Tonight I think to speak with Mademoiselle Millevoix.” She hooked her arm in Palmyra’s. They had known each other in Europe, hadn’t they? I hustled out of their way, leaving ahead of them.

“I assumed you must be reading every book in that library,” I heard Pammy say. “Vell, you know Mossy,” Marlene chuckled as they climbed the stairs she had just come down. “Und Mossy gafe you vut you vant?” Pammy asked, mimicking Marlene. “Und how, darlink.” “Oh well,” Pammy said, “I’m glad to know Mossy does that for somebody.” They exited together, laughing.

I thought, how genteel, if baffling. In those days the word “clueless” had not entered the lexicon. Yet I was able to reflect on my grandiloquent delirium of the morning. In my self-coronation, I’d forgotten a monarch is also a butterfly that can be crushed by anyone’s inadvertent heel.

But when I’d slunk to my car I had no car keys. I remembered jingling my key chain during the proud moment after hearing my Doll’s House version praised. I crouched behind a bush until Pammy drove off in Dietrich’s car. When I slunk back into the house against the tide of guests leaving Mossy’s party, I tried to hide against the wall. On my hands and knees in the deserted ballroom, I searched for my key chain until a Filipino house boy reached down to tap my back. He handed me my keys.