33

Bumblebee

Pammy was welcomed home venomously in Louella’s column: “Good for Mossy Zangwill over at Jubilee if he refuses to reinstate the oh-so-holier-than-thou Palmyra Millevoix who is importing not merely her European elegance but also an alien ideology. Radio stations should stop playing her songs the way Zangwill, once her champion and then some, has suspended her from the picture she walked out on. My spies tell me he is threatening to cancel her contract. If she doesn’t mend her ways, and fast, this non-citizen should be deported, and faster.”

But Louella didn’t run Jubilee. To my surprise Pammy plunged back into work at the studio, where Mossy immediately voided her suspension. He needed her; it was that simple. When I asked her why she was returning to the studio she said, “What good am I on the outside?” To the studio it was as if she’d had a fever that had receded and her temperature was now normal again. Mossy assured Pammy that the Mexican seamstresses had been given fifty percent raises with time and a half for overtime; he claimed he hadn’t known how little they were being paid before.

Nils Maynard had replaced Wick Fairless, the director Pammy hated, with Nils Maynard, and a quick rewrite of the script had given her a far stronger character. Love Is for Strangers now had Pammy leaving her unfaithful husband and subsequently taking up with a horse breeder, who in the earlier version had been only a friend of the philandering husband’s. Pammy’s character had a baby by the ne’er-do-well husband, causing her mother, played by Ethel Barrymore at her haughtiest, to refuse to see her grandchild and break off all contact with her daughter. Things went swiftly on the set, Pammy’s favorite, Stage Eight, which, she maintained, had the best acoustics on the lot.

I myself was put on the rewrite of a dud called Firebrand, their way of letting me know I was on probation. A young couple has bought their first home—the husband a fireman, the wife a bookkeeper in a clothing store. You know the rest: one evening the owner of the store, facing bankruptcy and assuming everyone has gone home, starts a fire to burn the store down so he can collect the insurance. The conscientious wife is still in the store going over sales records. By the time the fire trucks arrive the place is ablaze. The fireman fails to save his wife but does find evidence of arson. Brokenhearted, he tells the police who take forever to trace the fire to the owner. Meanwhile, the insurance company is tracking down all suspects and their investigator is a woman who, of course, falls for the fireman in his grief. Makes friends with his two adorable motherless youngsters. Nothing here but soapsuds, yet it was my back-in-the-fold assignment, and my fingers flew at the keys of my Royal, famished crows pecking for corn. The main change I made was to have the woman investigator be the daughter of the guilty store owner, which meant that eventually she’d have to choose between loyalty to her father and to the fireman who wants revenge. I was briskly replaced by the reliably arch Tutor Beedleman who didn’t care about the romance but spruced up the plot so that the fireman had a criminal record of his own, a shady past he was trying to escape. And so on.

Besides being the ultimate company towns, Hollywood and Washington have one further attribute in common that keeps everyone in either place from relaxing. They’re always trying to figure out what the rest of the country wants. More than anything else, it was the worry about whether his hunches would find audiences that kept Mossy as anti-union as he was. He wanted everyone on the lot to have the same vision he did: lines around the block in Schenectady. That left no time for labor disputes.

But Pammy had taken her secular vows, and San Francisco only confirmed them. Back at work on a picture, she hadn’t forgotten the principles behind the dockworkers’ strike. Anyone who was not an owner was by definition being exploited, from which it followed that owners were exploiters. Even if Mossy didn’t entirely own Jubilee because of his need for the New York bankers, he was New York’s West Coast proconsul and held a major portion of Jubilee stock. What Pammy wanted was to make Jubilee Pictures a model for the rest of Hollywood, a studio fully organized by unions.

She was hardly alone. Each craft had representatives who wanted the picture business to be part of the labor movement. Yeatsman a bit reluctantly led the writers—with the Screen Writers Guild still in its infancy, Mossy predictably supported their company union rivals, the Screen Playwrights. For all his bluster, Largo Buchalter was driving the interested directors. Set designers and decorators were restless. Cameramen were grumbling about overtime. Pammy was simply the most visible among the actors favoring a union. Like her sister Elise among the decorators, Pammy wanted to get all the crafts together, and after we returned from San Francisco she asked me who she ought to speak to among the carpenters.

To my eternal shame, I told her I’d heard that Hop Daigle, the jelly-eyed carpenter, had emerged as the leader among the set builders. She and Yeatsman had a private meeting with Daigle off the lot. They decided to hold a rally outside the Jubilee gates and announce plans to organize the studio. Then they had a second meeting with craft representatives—film editors, sound engineers, makeup artists, and stuntmen.

The day after the second meeting Willie Bioff, the labor fixer—racketeer, go-between, shakedown artist, they all fit—came to see Mossy again with, of course, Hop Daigle. I had no idea. When Elena Frye told me about this later, I knew I shouldered lasting responsibility and would never know how much. Daigle, whose jelly eye had turned whitish according to Elena, told them of the plans to organize Jubilee as essentially a union shop with many guilds representing the various crafts. Rumblings at the other studios were similar. It was primitive, hardly a threat to capitalist enterprise, nothing like the broad-based unions that were out to organize entire industries. But it was enough to make the Hollywood titans first shudder and then become furious. The rumor at Fox was that Darryl Zanuck threatened to mount a machine gun on a parapet above the studio gates and have anyone mowed down who marched outside with a picket sign.

Up north, Harry Bridges’s creed was to find out what the rank and file, as he always called longshoremen, wanted to do and then help them do it, from the bottom up. Willie Bioff, as he’d done when Jubilee’s sets were being trashed, would find out how much he could extort from the bosses, then pass as little of the boodle as possible to the workers, from the top down, keeping the rest for himself and his mob handlers. I doubt Bridges and Bioff ever met, but if they did they couldn’t have understood one another’s language. Elena Frye told me that Willie Bioff, smiling and joking throughout the meeting, had started at a hundred thousand dollars with Mossy, promising labor peace if his price was met, and had settled for thirty-five. Hop Daigle nodded his agreement, the jellied eye gone milky for the occasion, and Mossy quickly looked away.

The night before the rally at Jubilee I went to dinner at Pammy’s house. Millie at last had a real dog, which she’d delightedly named Cordell. Cordell was beloved in different ways by each of his mistresses—Millie, Costanza, and Pammy. Millie asked me if I could write a screamplay about her and Cordell. The puppy, an Airedale terrier, could still barely stand so Millie carried it. She’d taken the name from her mother’s jingle on the secretary of state, who the seven-year-old Millie hadn’t heard of. She seldom sang it the same way twice. “I’m in love with Cordell Hull, He treats me nice though he’s awfully dull.” Sometimes, trying out a new word, Millie would do the second line as “But I have to admit he’s indubitably dull,” and in an irritable mood she’d sing, “When he’s mean I want to bash his skull.” Cordell the dog, unlike his stolid namesake, was as lively and jumpy as his puppy legs would let him be, but when he was swooped into Millie’s arms he subsided into a quick cuddle.

Pammy and I scarcely had eye contact at dinner. In the way a precocious child can dominate an occasion, the conversation wound around Millie, Cordell, her school, or something she hoped to do. The three of us chewed our lamb chops in unison, each new subject announced by Millie, and we were not a family.

Before Costanza took her upstairs, Millie asked me for a story. I told her that in my story there would be a fairy godmother and a mean mother. “Oh good,” she said, “a really mean mother.” I set off, not knowing where I was headed, and had looked away from Millie to her mother when Millie asked me to describe the fairy godmother. “She was so pretty,” I said, “that she looked like a sunny morning in a golden meadow. She had gossamer eyebrows below her wide forehead lined with all the thinking she did, and the eyebrows slanted down a little on the sides giving her hazel eyes perhaps a tiny glimmer of sadness, but it was only the sadness that there were too many more children to help than she had time to get to, so whenever she helped a child her eyes became a little less sad. At the tip of her nose her nostrils widened slightly giving her the look of wanting something she didn’t quite have, or once had but didn’t have anymore.”

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

“Uncle Owen, what’s gossamer eyebrows?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What came first was the end of time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Her song is gone.”

“C’maaahn, kid,” he said. “So you don’t get the girl. You get the memories.”

“The hell with you, Mossy. What did you want to see me about?”

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

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

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

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

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

Under my door at home: MY DEEPEST SYMPATHIES STOP OVERWHELMED BY FURY AT FASCIST RUBOUT OF LOVELIEST PROGRESSIVE SOUL STOP NON ILLIGITAMUS CARBORUNDUM STOP CARRY ON STOP QUIN. Switching to Latin no doubt when Western Union wouldn’t let him say bastards.

Quick, emergency appointment with Pogo early Saturday before the funeral. Loss, pain, denial, fury, retreat to childhood. From an earlier appointment he already knew about San Francisco—the unexpected fulfillment of my love for Pammy as the waterfront battle raged—and that things had been more distant though still hopeful after my return home. He didn’t mind seeing me on a Saturday morning, but he was unusually argumentative. Though he’d read about the horror at the studio gates, I described it anyway. “Did she want to die?” he challenged. “No!” I thundered, offended. “Then why get up in public with so much antagonism in the air, so many threats, right after what happened up north, the ecstasy of violence?”

“Ecstasy” was a strange word to use, I thought, but I let it go. “What happened in San Francisco,” I said, “was already violent for a good two months before the police opened fire on the strikers. Courage was needed, and she had enough to give a talk in public.” “A defiant talk,” he said, “a very political talk in a time of vicious politics, a polarizing talk when the sides are poles apart. A mature adult knows dry leaves need only a tiny spark to set them ablaze.” “Okay,” I said, “but she didn’t want to leave her daughter, her songwriting, even me, dammit, she didn’t want to leave me.”

He took a deep breath, having stepped away from being my analyst to advocating for the death instinct. “I’m not blaming her,” he said, “I blame her killer of course. A terrible crime, an unfathomable loss. I’m telling you only that she may have had feelings of welcome concerning death itself. There is a ripeness that comes to fruit ready to drop off the tree. The song ‘Born Blue,’ risqué connotations combined with deep melancholy.”

“She was working for some kind justice, campaigning for it.”

“Yes, but she was also in open rebellion against neglectful parents—the Church, the studio, an unfair political climate, perhaps against the domination of men.” It sounded to me as though he was trying to synthesize Marx and Freud; perhaps the endless uncivil war between the followers of each was being waged in Dr. Pogorzelski himself. “I can venture,” he said, “that in the unconscious there are no accidents. I’m not telling you she wanted to die, only that what you do now with her death will probably be to re-order its meaning. To think of her murderer, for instance, as trying to deprive you of her. How is her death affecting you?”

“Awful. I feel awful,” I said, indignant but also tearful. “I’ve never felt so besieged by, I don’t know, the gods, fate. Abandoned.”

“Abandoned? Again … ?”

“Yes, for Christ’s sake.”

“This is what I mean,” he said. “You say she didn’t want to die yet you feel abandoned by her. Another interpretation for the flower you dreamed of with the sick petals. Palmyra held the wilted flower as she vanished into the sea. You were already afraid of losing her when you didn’t yet even have her. Perhaps in your unconscious she gave herself up for you in order to show you how to count for something, substituted her own death for yours.”

“Have it your way.” I stopped for a moment as I considered his drift, the concept of sacrifice. I found myself weeping. “But she did not goddamn intend to die,” I blurted.

“I’m talking about the possibilities in your unconscious, a place where she has now joined all the dead, especially the prematurely dead.”

Dry-eyed, I asked him about the unconscious itself, its meaning.

“What do you mean its meaning?” he said. “You know the unconscious is what we have either schooled ourselves to forget or not yet permitted through the doorway of awareness. Either way, this is repression.”

“I know the conscious mind of Palmyra Millevoix doesn’t exist any more. It’s as dead as the rest of her.”

“That’s right,” he said. “Of course.”

“But what about the unconscious?” I asked. “If the unconscious isn’t conscious, how do we know it dies too?”

“We don’t know where the unconscious goes. Is it merely a function of the conscious mind that we haven’t yet been granted access to, or is it a separate entity with its own independent existence? Are we finally dreaming, or are we being dreamed? Next time, Owen, see you next time. So sorry for your loss.”

But something made me want to turn the tables on him. “Wait a minute,” I said. “You’re aggressive today. Her death bothers you. Are you angry yourself?”

“Goddamn right I am,” Dr. Pogorzelski said.

Elise Millevoix had insisted that everything on Stage Eight be draped in white for her sister. “Death is not black,” she told me. “It’s everything bleached, it’s the whitest of whiteness.” The casket itself, placed on a raised floor of the set where Nils and Pammy had been shooting their picture, was covered in white silk with a blue fleur-de-lys on it. Pammy never claimed Frenchness in particular, but the prop department had already been given Yeatsman’s adaptation of Madame Bovary, in which Pammy was to star, and they were confecting various Gallic emblems. “A fleur-de-lys is a hell of a lot better than a Red Star anyway,” Yeatsman mumbled as we walked in together. The microphone was so close to the casket that the speakers could hardly escape the impression that they were being judged by its occupant. Finishing a medley of Millevoix songs, the Jubilee studio orchestra segued into the Third Brandenburg Concerto’s first movement.

Wagons of flowers had been trucked to the studio by Obie Joyful from the Zangwills’ lush hyperbole of a garden. Harry Bridges sent tulips and a thank-you note. From Washington President and Mrs. Roosevelt sent yellow roses and purple violets. From London Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald sent red and white roses, and from Paris Andre Malraux, as if knowing what Elise Millevoix wanted for her sister, sent a bouquet of white lilies. Unaccountably, since their politics were so far from Pammy’s, both William Randolph Hearst and Benito Mussolini had dispatched garlands to honor the fallen star. FDR’s and Malraux’s messages were notable, the former’s mostly because it was from The White House. Goddard Minghoff read aloud from the tributes. “Mrs. Roosevelt and I will forever gratefully recall,” the president (or his ghostwriter) said, “the melodic sweetness and captivating charm Palmyra Millevoix brought to a nation recovering hope in a time of unprecedented calamity.” Malraux simply quoted himself, or his publishers did, in English: “The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.” To which the great author, in the midst of his own leftist period, added, “Bon voyage, ma petite tourterelle engagée.”

At least six hundred of Jubilee’s contract employees crowded Stage Eight. Mossy was in the front row with Esther Leah, two people sitting next to each other looking as though they were on opposite sides of the country. Two hundred additional seats were set aside for honored guests, mostly from the Hollywood community. Jack Warner wasn’t there—no sentimentalist, he would not give up a Saturday polo match—but Louie Mayer was never one to pass up an opportunity to shed righteous tears. Mervyn Gallant had wheedled his way past the guards, steering his Hispano Suiza onto the lot where Joey Jouet had worked until he was fired and, on his last day, bestowed his final act of kindness by fixing the old silent picture director’s flat tire prior to pitching himself off the Santa Monica Pier. “A vocalist who’ll be greatly missed,” Gallant said to no one in particular as he entered Stage Eight, “only wish I could have used her myself.” Hurd Dawn also came back to pay his respects to a woman he adored, and I was pleased to see him wearing the old cape that had made him look so majestic I had taken him for Amos Zangwill himself my first day on the lot. Hurd embraced Elise, enfolding her in his cape.

The musicians and composers contingent would have pleased Pammy. Duke Ellington was playing at the Cocoanut Grove, so he was there, as were Benny Goodman, Dorothy Field, Jack Teagarden, and Russ Columbo, who had less than two months to live before his own mysterious gunshot death. Columbo came in with his girlfriend Carole Lombard as all heads turned. They stayed turned while Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, both in town composing picture scores, walked in together.

Bravely, Teresa Blackburn gave the first eulogy. Sensibly, she addressed the casket. “Dear darling Pammy,” she said, “what times we had, and should have had. I want to raise a child as you were raising Millie, and learn from you as I learned about my profession, and about personal life, and public life, and about love, from you. You were stolen from us so cruelly it is hard to see any divine hand behind the brutal act. Please help us to carry on in your spirit, your name, with your principles. Anything I ever do that’s good will be because I knew you, dearest Pammy.”

Prominent friends and colleagues briefly recalled the first time they had met Pammy, and how it was to work with her, and how they missed her. When it was Mossy’s turn he walked to the microphone wearing large sunglasses to hide his black eye and perhaps the sting of remorse. Often he reminded me of a cannibal; today he was a defrocked bishop, shamed and using his sunglasses as an unsuccessful disguise. “What happened this week at Jubilee Pictures,” he began, “is not only sad and terrible, it is beyond my understanding, beyond all meaning. This taking of Palmyra Millevoix hits all of us where we live most profoundly, and we live most profoundly in our hearts. What can we say or do as we begin to begin again, as we struggle to find any consolation, anything that will comfort us? I can’t say I know the answer. I can say Palmyra Millevoix was passionate about her work. I believe she would want us to carry on with ours, and carry on we will.”

Listening to Mossy, I wondered who he had dragooned into helping him with this. Maybe for once no one. Did he have any idea how mad she had been at him when she died? He might have. “It’s no secret”—he said as I held my breath for a confession, which those around me seemed also to do—“that Pammy and Jubilee had a falling out recently. We wanted what we wanted, and she wanted what she wanted. But these were family quarrels, that’s all, and she was working diligently and brilliantly on this very stage, almost finished with a new picture, until two days ago. The last time we spoke I offered her Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov. She accepted eagerly. How wonderful she’d have been in that great role.”

The assemblage sagged. Far from an acknowledgment of an affair or even of something as mundane as a new contract, this seemed a blatant lie, possibly made up on the spot. But was it? Who ever knew with Amos Zangwill? He wound up with a little couplet, stretching out every syllable, letting someone else express his feelings so he wouldn’t have to reveal them in front of Esther Leah. Possibly he was trying to soothe the anger of the coffin’s tenant, apologize to her. ‘“No more will linger down the days The flowing wonder of her ways.’ I yield now to Jubilee’s own Yancey Ballard, who tells me where to go when he feels I’m out of line, and who wrote Pammy one of the finest roles she ever had in The Mill on the Floss. Yancey talked me into letting the novel’s unhappy ending stand, and he was right even though the picture sank without a trace. Sometimes, as we all know today to our sorrow, endings do have to be unhappy.”

His cud chewed, his whole body slouching, Mossy returned to his seat.

Yeatsman was the final speaker. He stood silently, staring at the casket for a long moment, and I wasn’t sure he could speak at all, he seemed so consumed with rage and grief. “If we are believers,” he commenced, “it is hard not to impute to the Almighty a malign intent at such a time. How could he, if he even bothers to exist anymore, let this happen? How in the name of himself could he take her from us? Oh God.”

Yancey heaved a sob, and I thought he couldn’t continue, but after a pause he summoned his chivalry. “Music is as natural as breathing, as eloquent as prayer; it’s how we praise creation, mourn, rejoice. Pammy’s music is about delight, sadness, love, loss, sometimes all the emotions in the same room at the same moment. Her music now outlasts her, reminding us of what we had, what we lost.”

He put his hand on the casket and patted the white silk covering it. “A studio head,” Yancey said, now winding himself up, “and I’ll be uncharacteristically charitable enough not to name him except to quiet your fears by revealing he has nothing to do with Jubilee, recently called Palmyra Millevoix a Red bitch. I’ll tell you something. This Red bitch could sing. This Red bitch could write, and this Red bitch could act. This Red bitch could turn a braggart into a mouse, and this Red bitch could also turn a man into a giant, and she could turn him back into a cricket whose measly chirp, whose squeak, was that of a bully who had learned his lesson. A number of you out there know firsthand what I’m talking about.” Some squirming was visible, and appreciative titters were heard.

“In this room,” he continued, “on this sound stage she worked, in this town where we are all geniuses, each of us believing himself or herself to be in possession of more brilliance than the person in the next chair—go ahead, look around, you’re better than any of the others, aren’t you?—and at the same time assailed by doubts and even by the conviction that all we’re doing is fooling our betters who will any day now spot us for the untalented impostors we truly are, which of us knows a star or a musician or a singer or a picture-maker who is not vain? As we pay our respects here to a woman who scorned and mocked vanity, we do well to remember that this occasion is only the frightened tithe we offer death, the wily thief lying in wait to rob all of us of everything we have.”

Yeatsman finished as a hush fell over the usually noisy throng of egotists, now as silent as just before a take. “All of us are inflated with illusions,” he said. “That is our sin. Pammy had no illusions. That, perhaps, was hers. She had been cured of illusions long before we knew her. Instead of conceit and selfishness, she shared her gifts, her talent for living and loving. She was our graceful swan, comely, elegant, her voice the voice of an angel with sex appeal, her song the song of gentle breezes through trees in leaf, of water playing over pebbles. Who can be here today and not complain with my own hero William Yeats of a fire in our heads? Enough. We can only hope with the Irish bard that our Pammy has found the other wild swans, where she may glide free

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.”

Hollywood is no stranger to overdoing everything in its path. But that day, that sweltering noon in the last week of July 1934, the members of the Jubilee family did not perform the tears they shed. As for Mossy himself, he had to be helped from Stage Eight by Elena Frye and Esther Leah. His shiner, hidden behind the dark glasses, was weeping on its own, but I would give him credit for half his tears being genuine grief at the catastrophe he endured, or caused, or both.

The saying around town was that your first murder in Los Angeles was for free. Despite rumors that lived far longer than the victim, no promising suspects surfaced. No arrest was ever made.

The New York Times reported that the passing of Palmyra Millevoix set off a wave of public mourning not seen since the death of Rudolph Valentino eight years earlier. Millevoix fan clubs sponsored memorial services around the country. Some were even held in churches, but the liveliest were in theaters, the picture palaces she had filled with her larger-than-life self that was now also larger than death.

It turned out to be a killing week. In Vienna, Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss was assassinated during a failed Nazi coup meant to take over Austria. Hitler had to wait another four years to march into Linz, his Austrian hometown, and on to Vienna. In Chicago, the bank robber, murderer, and hard times folk hero John Dillinger was killed by the FBI as he came out of a theater where he had just seen Manhattan Melodrama starring Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, and William Powell. Both men and women rushed to dip their handkerchiefs in Dillinger’s blood for souvenirs of the bandit some believed was a Robin Hood of the Depression years.

I had to reach Millie before any radios or visitors did. Seven years were all Millie was granted to know her mother, and her mother was all she really knew. My nine years with my own mother suddenly felt opulent. I wondered if Millie had had time to build a little world of her own or if she was still so attached to her mother that this would be like the amputation of a vital organ. What could I do with her, feeling as aimless and neglected as I did? I knew I was at the end of my youth, but being only twenty-four I also knew I was at the beginning of something else, though I wouldn’t have dignified it by calling it maturity. It was something larger than I was though I participated in it, something about Hollywood, about the Communists, about the country and our Great Depression, how they all fought one another yet also intersected.

A chilling possibility from the grogshop of my grief: if Pammy had lived would she have become infected by starshine, too burned even to mention me in her memoirs, sticking to fellow celebrities? Very well, I remained in love with a shadow that needed no substance. The shadow itself would reliably vanish, I already knew, like a ballerina twirling offstage, filling me with memory until the day when I become only a memory myself. So are we all, possessors of memories until we are vanished into the memories of others.

Elise Millevoix Jouet wasn’t coming out to Red Woods with her own children until the next day. She held herself together until the funeral was over and then essentially collapsed into her twin griefs—for Pammy and, always, her guilt over the death of her husband, her conscience on the rack as if she’d been sentenced by Torquemada. She said she couldn’t face Millie until I’d done the dirty work.

I kept my radio off as I set out because I didn’t want to hear about the police following their leads, nor did I want to listen to Pammy’s songs being played in the dirge of obituaries. This did no good because on a hot day the other cars had their windows down and their radios on. As I drove through the communities heading east, the Millevoix songs rang out until they seemed to be the air I was breathing. Some homes probably had radios on, but the persistence of certain songs suggested people were playing their favorite records on phonographs as they said goodbye. One house played “Dynamite,” and I remembered when she and Jolson had sung together—“There’s never an erosion, It’s more like an explosion When Dinah makes me feel high as the sky; She’s such dynamite that I love her, Maybe Dinah might love me too, For I’d love to be her lover And I know that I’d be true.” Another house broadcast “Can Sara Wear a Pair ‘A Dungarees”—“I’ll ask it sweetly, I’ll go down upon my knees: Hear my prayer, Mr. McDougall, I know you’re kinda frugal, But could Sara wear a pair ’a dungarees?”

A large house in San Marino was blasting forth “I’ll be brokenhearted ‘till the next time we kiss,/ I’ll be brokenhearted, It started when we parted, I’ll be brokenhearted, like thiiiiiis.” At a mansion half a mile away a loudspeaker had been installed on the lawn and was broadcasting “I can do anything except say goodbye Since the word by itself leaves a tear in my eye, So please don’t ask if you don’t want me to cry, I never have found where’s the good in goodbye.” Finally, a house was playing “Born Blue” and I was sure the trees themselves were drooping. It was a small home with a hedge around it in Azusa. “I’m born blue, blue, blue; That’s me not you, you, you; It’s always been true … that I was born blue.” Pammy herself knew her song fit its composer. For the girl of my dreams, there was never anything else she could be.

The song floated from homes on the afternoon wind. I heard “Born Blue” several more times—in Pomona, Claremont, finally in Upland itself as I approached San Antonio Heights, where Pammy lived. Lived on weekends. Had lived. “If you hear this song in a bar or a train, Put a nickel in the Wurlitzer and play it again.” I comforted myself with the sad smile that Pammy’s ghost must be tired of singing “Born Blue” by now.

Half a mile from the house was a roadblock. Eight or ten cars were pulled over to the side. The roadblock was manned not by police but by two uniformed guards. I recognized the familiar logo, a starburst with Jubilee Pictures inscribed below it. One of the guards approached me and I identified myself as a writer for the studio and a friend of the family needing to get through to the house to see Miss Millevoix’s daughter. The guard addressed me as if he were reading a script written for a Marine officer. “Mr. Zangwill’s orders were to keep everyone away until you were inside the property, sir,” the guard said. “Fans are showing up for some kind of vigil and we were instructed not to let anyone through until you were with the daughter.”

So Mossy was muscling in even now. He wasn’t doing any harm. Still, I resented his hand in creating the roadblock. I’d shortly be with the daughter.

I approached the Red Woods grounds, fronted by its row of date palms interspersed with camphor trees, which secluded the house from the road. Pammy had invited me here for the weekend and now here I was. I smelled the pungent camphor before the house was visible, and when I saw the trees I began to be nervous. The palms and camphors, which made agreeable pairs when I’d seen them before, looked uneasy, mismatched today. When I turned into the circular driveway Costanza and Millie rushed out to the front porch of the rambling old ranch house that Pammy had restored. Millie was carrying her puppy, Cordell, with his enormous paws on his small quivering body. How was I going to do this? What could Millie know? Costanza had assured me radios had been put in closets all over the house so Millie would not hear any news at all, much less stations devoting their entire programming to her mother.

As I pulled up in front of the porch Costanza was already talking to me. She was like an overfilled balloon ready to burst. “Mr. Owen, thank God, I’m so glad, I don’t know how long –” and she pointed to the edge of the driveway where, though I hadn’t noticed as I drove in, a photographer was camped, waiting for a picture of Millie.

“Uncle Owen,” Millie said, “what took you so long? We’ve been waiting for you all day. Will you tell me a story?”

Costanza had evidently continued to hold herself together since I’d last spoken to her on the phone. Now, as she saw me and knew what I had to tell Millie, her face was suddenly, though still silently, a stream of tears. I nodded at her and asked Millie to take me up to her room. Costanza ran to the kitchen and I heard her turn the water on in the sink to hide her bawling as I swept Millie into my arms and started to carry her up the stairs. “Oh, Uncle Owen, don’t be silly,” she said, “I can beat you upstairs any day.” She ran and I followed. Behind me Cordell struggled stair by stair.

Millie’s room had stars on the ceiling, a light shade of sky blue on the upper portion of the wall, a darker watery blue on the lower portion. On the wall was a large blown-up photograph of Pammy and Millie as they ran along a beach toward the camera. An eager pair, mirroring each other, all laughter, hair blown on their faces. We sat on Millie’s bed, Cordell at her feet. For a moment each of us looked at the other, and I could hear the seconds of Millie’s innocence ticking down. I took a deep breath and for some reason she did the same. “Millie honey,” I said, “I have to say something I’d give the world not to tell you.”

“Hush,” she said as she reached up and put her small hand over my mouth. “Let’s sing.”