Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane

by Carson, Tom

  Since he had his pride and Chet Dooley had offended it, even Pam’s services as a Los Angeles sherpa were declined with a non-answer to my welcoming telegram—or did it just go undelivered? Only Western Union knows—when Bill came back in ’51 to watch Universal shoot his two jokers and then stayed on awhile. Unlike me, unless Pam’s mute parody of an extra in The Gal I Left Behind Me counts, he ended up on the screen himself, acting or pretending to alongside Audie Murphy in an adaptation of The Red Badge of Courage—a project that made my second husband suffer. Passionate to see history resurrected on film, Gerson had been trying to get a Civil War picture on track forever, but Metro’s pashas let Dore Schary do that one.

  Once or twice during Red Badge’s looping, Mrs. Gerson, as I was by then, saw or thought she saw Bill chowing down at one of the commissary’s long tables. Unsure if he’d forgiven me for The Gal, I knew that was no place to find out, especially since Huston was there. He was contentedly stroking the jawbone of an ass as usual with those prehensile fingers, and I’ll never figure out what made a smartypants like Lillian Ross fall for that sawdust-leaking act.

  I also had and have no idea if Bill took the part as a lark or was trying out a way of being “Bill M.” whose propinquity vis-à-vis Bill M. would make sense to him. He only appeared in one other movie before giving up the whim, celluloid’s help in objectifying intimations of spuriousness clearly not having done for him what it did for Audie—who held them at bay for fifteen years by playing in Westerns whose only tension was the abiding mystery of his imploringly boyish face, not Dorian Gray’s so much as our own Dorian Khaki’s. While an actor he wasn’t, that Medal of Honor we remembered was a sort of inoculatory super-Oscar.

  According to You Must Remember This, which I don’t doubt is trustworthy research-wise even if I never did read it all the way through, Bill next decamped pen, pad, and helmet to Korea, that reject pile of bits of World War Two that hadn’t been fought at the time; it wasn’t his war. More touching for Pam was learning that he’d gotten his pilot’s license sometime in the Fifties and was soon flying his own plane, since the motivation for that grab at autonomy was crystal clear to his fellow passenger on Clio. I hadn’t forgotten watching Jessie Auster turn into a dot in the sky.

  Trying to be good for something while denying he was good at something, as Tim puts it in one of his better guesses about the man, Bill made a quixotic run for Congress and lost to some Republican windmill. He didn’t go back to full-time cartooning until Eisenhower’s second term. Then he stuck to his last for thirty years, and as I recall he only brought back his two Stars and Stripes jokers for Omar Bradley’s funeral. But not ex-President Ike’s, and my hunch is Bill couldn’t bring himself to draw that pair saluting any politician.

  When the newspapers said he was ailing with Alzheimer’s, of course I wrote him. Going by the photographs, my knit-capped Aladdin had certainly blown up into a Jeremiac bullfrog, but by 2003 Bill’s onetime Anzio Bobbsey twin was no very succulent morsel either. Got no answer, didn’t expect any. Something like ten thousand other people had been moved to write to him too, and they were on more intimate terms with him. They were mostly perfect strangers, and at best I’d have been an imperfect one.

  Posted by: Pam

  When you’re as ancient as we were and only I still am, the most persistent revisers of your own muddled first-draft sense of what the whole shebang was about are other people’s obituaries—from Bill’s three years ago to, a good deal more recently, Dottie Idell’s. Not so the twenty-odd inches the Post gave in November 1986 (the NYT was stingier, and Tim, Chris, and I all said “Fuck ’em”) to ex–Lieutenant Commander, then Ambassador “Hopsie” Cadwaller. In that case I already knew my own emotions blindfolded.

  It was a few weeks after we’d buried your great-grandfather that catching sight of Nothing Like a Dame’s brittle spine in our living room’s newly insensitive bookcases gave me my first real pang of mortification at its light-heartedness since Bill’s and my boozy afternoon in Chasen’s. My one and only World War Two, and I’d vamped it up into 253 pages of taffy.

  Even though You Must Remember This does its best to exonerate me, I’m afraid Marlene Dietrich was right. I’d always been able to hedge my remorse by deflecting it into contempt for The Gal I Left Behind Me’s worse inanities, but the bungled screen version had long since stopped airing even on the Insomnia Channel and the silly, flirty book was still there. My book, by Pamela Buchanan, with Bill’s fond cover art its major value to collectors even then. Coquettishness wasn’t his specialty, but he’d given me a saucy come-hitler look and added a fun comma of Garbodacious cleavage when I lankily modeled fists to hips and chin atilt in surplus fatigues.

  Wined and dined by a waxy Andy and now rewined in the Georgetown house I sold inside a year to take up my falcon roost at the Rochambeau, a Pam then only in her mid-sixties pulled Nothing out to ponder Bill’s already unrecognizable caricature. Wondered what had become of the original, then got hugely annoyed at how my Greta-garbling thoughts had tricked me into a maudlin, movieishly mawkish, blundering double meaning. Tossed the book, grew gradually aware my wineglass wasn’t a pet—i.e., summonable by flopping my hand in its general direction—and refilled it. Soon was quoting and requoting my favorite made-up line for Judy Garland: “Toto, I’m blotto.”

  I refuse to blame Cath Charters. For Nothing’s vapidity, not my 1986 hangover. Roy’s ex was not only doing her job as my agent but did it damned well. When I crossed my legs and put up my hands in her office, I didn’t have a clue what sort of book I wanted to get published, and note phrasing. Everyone I knew was getting contracts for them and one rather felt one was traipsing around in last summer’s organdy without a Random House advance. I was frantic to catch her interest, also to divert it. Never did learn for sure if amiably meowing Cath knew about my Pleistocene sessions of the old buck and wing with Roy during my divorce from Murphy.

  So I made haste with the bright, evasive anecdotes: “From Co-Respondent to Correspondent,” “Never Ask for Towels on a Troopship,” “Mark Clark’s Nose Is Out of Joint,” “Undone in London,” “Omaha Ha-Ha’s,” “Eddie’s Norman Conquest,” “Hurtin’ in the Huertgen,” and the dismal rest of Nothing’s eventual table of contents. Pam’s thought was that once I’d got done thawing the icy crap out of her, we’d get down to what I’d really seen, and while all I may have meant by that was anecdotes with a grimmer, more crimson-laced, whey-faced palette, now I’ll never know. What Cath knew was the sales figures for See Here, Private Hargrove, to which—forgive me, Bill—Nothing got favorably compared.

  “Well, there’s your book,” said my agent, though I’d only dried up because I was nerving myself to talk about Dachau. Not the easiest topic to carom off a bright laugh in a Midtown aerie, with Cath’s green nails adding busy ticks of New York ornamentation to the silver baptismal cup—bought for a GI Bill song by one of her young authors in Rheims—she used for mint juleps come sunset. “How fast can you write it?”

  Answer: pretty fugging fast. Five months: April to September ’46, in the furnished apartment I’d rented in a Brooklyn rooming house. Not a New York I’d ever known, but Sutton Place, the West Village, and the Upper West Side were looking like three on a match to me. Lifting dead Daisy’s typewriter out of the Paris footlocker, I ignored the Lotus Eater’s malicious invitation—chauffeur-capped for some forgotten bit of Twenties zaniness, she was peeking out of a snapshot in the backwash of curios underneath—to hoist the window’s sash and scatter my mother’s chaotic pages of The Gold-Hatted Lover to the winds. Then I Smith-Coronated a kitchen table where Pam would never slice a single onion, much less spend an idle May morn dotting muffin dough with cherry bits in nothing but my borrowed shoes, and started clattering away like Perle Mesta’s bracelets. I mostly ate cigarettes.

  After going to the then considerable trouble of getting my ETO Regent’s articles photocopied, I doubt I looked a
t them even once. The scrupulous Pam who’d written those had been able to welcome midnight as I hunted for an appropriately valorous evocation of “smelly” before one a.m. gave me my lead: “Rank means very little at this crossroads south of St. Vith, where rankness is the key to your fellow Americans’ respect. Climbing out of our jeep to be briefed on the situation, which looked tricky but promising, by Captain Maxwell H. Folger [how had Roy let that one by?], 24, of Coffeyville, Md., we felt disgracefully scrubbed and pink…”

  And so on for the rest of “Tiger! Tiger!,” by Pamela Buchanan’s 2,000 pungent words about life in a tank-destroyer battalion ten days after the relief of Bastogne. Yes, we were ornate in those days, Panama: had to be, to prove to Hitler and our readers that no obscenity we saw could blunt our sensibility. Now I had no one to do justice to but me and I knew I was trivial. Gloriously trivial, like the bright yellow cabs going by in no fear of artillery spotters or the ball game blaring from the sidewalk.

  When one doubleheader stopped my fingers in midair, I was nearly done with a bit of foolery about Eddie quizzing a perspiring Vichy mayor on the local Calvados and fromages. To keep the mood light, I was skipping the coda that his former nonstituents were preparing to hang him. The astonishing urgency in the announcer’s voice had me wondering what counterattack or map coordinate “Cookie Lavagetto! Cookie Lavagetto!” was code for, but Red Barber was speaking in clear and I heard thimbled roars. Then I went back to batting out Nothing Like a Dame as if I were lustily joshing at a party.

  Which I often also did for real, since those same unabashed cabs pumpkined me into Manhattan more nights than not from my Brooklyn digs. Once the postwar edition of Midtown enfolded me, the heaped lights looked like avalanches in reverse, breviaries in an aviary: I’d last seen them dimmed to keep U-boat captains from figuring out whether the Bronx was up and the Battery down. Any wingding whose backdrop was Rose Butaker Dawson’s Cunard Heights balcony or Ann Darrow Driscoll’s Central Park zoo would’ve had the rest of their riffraff combing the hospitals if I was a no-show.

  I’d been to both houses in my last Pamcarnation. But when I got back from our European war, both those salty pillars of society—Rose, the Picasso collector at the pinnacle of art’s meeting with commerce; Ann, the blonde ingenue famed as the first bride to scream “I do” from the top of the Empire State Building—took me into their fold as if we now shared something too obvious to speak of. I lost touch with Ann when she left New York after a notoriously botched mid-Seventies facelift, but the bowl old Rose had finished glazing just before her death in 1997 got sent on to me by her granddaughter. UPS delivered it in Etruscan shards, but I was flattered all the same.

  Posted by: Pam

  As I was, bikini girl, truly, when your dad dedicated his damned book to me. His passages Egyptologizing my now mummified Nothing Like a Dame (Henry Holt, 1947) and its 1949 screen mutation could still have benefited from Roy Charters’s blue pencil. “The hilarity of these faded reminiscences [mine is part of a lineup, given away by Pam’s wilted corsage] can make us wonder if their authors were idiots,” writes Tim, taking the bull by the horns as he never does conversationally. “But they weren’t. They were crazed with relief because it was over. If you ever come across Nothing Like a Dame at a library sale, treat it kindly. You’re holding the postures and japes of a sensitive woman who’d seen atrocious things. Now she’s trying to convince us as merrily as she can that neither she nor her generation were scarred for life when they sailed on the Titanic’s return trip to face down King Kong.”

  Bizarrely mixed analogies aside—we didn’t smash into a hairy black iceberg, did we?!?—I do wish Tim had asked me before he volunteered to play Pam’s shrink in print. Trauma, please! Ask the boys under snow in the Ardennes about traumas, even though you’d have to sew that one’s fucking mouth back on to get an answer out of the dumb fuck. Jesus Christ, Eddie! What had that dumb fuck been thinking to go back for his fucking gas mask, something even the dumbest GI tossed on his first route march? Jesus!

  Consider the odds that I sounded like a glib, shallow ninny because I bloody well was a glib, shallow ninny, like most people that age—not really that much more advanced than yours, bikini girl. Since turnabout is fair play, my diagnosis is that your dad’s the one playing shell games with bonnets and bees: overcompensating, as the Floydians say, for the fact that he’ll never know what it was really like.

  And soon nobody will. No one at all on this groaning, valiantly sashaying planet; not even dear Bob, whose clout with this administration is clearly more minimal than he suspects. Leaving out Vonnegut, whom I regret I’ve never met, he’s almost the last of them left whose name people will recognize in the obituary. Besides Norman, obviously, whose own clacking cubby in Brooklyn I learned many years later wasn’t too far from mine. Sure can’t say the same for the respective results of our labors.

  Of those gone on ahead up the bluffs, I suppose Bill’s obit affected me most. “Come on, Pammie! Cut yourself some slack. The nurses aren’t in mine either,” I reheard him say as the Jan. 23, 2003, WashPost slid out of lunette range and became an annoyed Kelquen’s hat. I rescued it as she shook it off, more slowly than she might’ve when younger. “What’s that line from Whitman everyone loves now? ‘The real war will never get in the books’?”

  “Oh, Bill! At least you tried.”

  Posted by: Pamita

  Once my manuscript was moored like a cockleshell among Holt’s dreadnoughts, I did have misgivings. They just aren’t those Tim attributes to me. Four different editors tried to talk me out of reprinting “The Gates of Hell,” my May 17, 1945, Regent’s report from Dachau, as Nothing’s very peculiar appendix. One of them suggested I at least give readers fair warning by prefacing it with the Webster’s definition of “incongruous,” and I took Doc Selzer up on it too: “Not corresponding with what is right, proper, or reasonable; unsuitable; inappropriate.” The whole garish misstep was dropped from the paperback, even from the hardcover’s last dozen printings.

  A few otherwise Dame-smitten reviewers chided my “immaturity” (Boston Carbuncle) or “surprising tastelessness” (Savannah Klaxon) in subjecting readers to that final, I swear, “cold shower” (Sacramento Malaprop). One or two oddballs admired the discordance; I learned from Gilbert Seldes, no less, Krazy Kat’s champion back in the Twenties, that the best writing in the book was the page Holt left blank between the main text and “The Gates of Hell.” Pro or con, those were the exceptions. The vast majority of Dame’s glowing notices ignored my odd appendix, like diners too stuffed with turkey to mention the hostess had soiled herself, the universal stain browning her wiggly white satin, as coffee was served.

  Their deafening silence was why I agreed to an appendectomy when we went back to press. But Tim got his mitts on a first printing, and did You Must Remember This ever go to town on Dachau’s there-and-not-there. I could so easily have set your dad straight, bikini girl! I knew my motives for reprinting a sample of my war reporting, and the agenbite of inwit played no part. They weren’t conscience-stricken; they were vain.

  Only my never met champion Celia Brady pegged it in her review: “Now that she’s finished clowning, the lovely Miss B. would like us to know she can so play Hamlet.” Bingo. I didn’t want readers of what might be my only book to think giggles were all I had on when I hopped out of the cake, and I was proud of “The Gates of Hell.” It was the hardest piece I’d ever had to write, and its opening line—“This pile died in a boxcar”—had won the admiration of none other than Cyril Connolly.

  Anyhow, were I fifty years younger, I’d be tiddling my nose at Tim now in cyberspace. With one obvious exception, who left us long ago—brain aneurysm, 1965, Saigon—nobody, Panama’s dad included, ever divined the identity of the tailor’s dummy I’d anonymized in Regent’s as “the soldier”: “Quite possibly for good, the soldier’s face changed” and so on.

  He was the very
same fellow who’d rollicked through the rest of my book barking bon mots like traffic commands: “‘Oh, hell,’ Eddie groaned. ‘It’s the seventh Calvados to the rescue’…‘I don’t know about you, Pam, but I think Field Marshal Montgomery just told us to turn left at the snow job,’ Eddie said…‘Shut up, Eddie, for Christ’s sake,’ I told him. ‘I’ve had it with your masculine wiles.’ ‘I’ve had it with yours too,’ he grunted. ‘I’ve hated you since Normandy.’” If those tastes of our wit strike you as caviar, by all means start haunting library sales. Not counting selling my own, which I won’t (“Glad I could help you out, kiddo—whoever you were, are or will be. All my love, Bill”), there’s no such thing as a copy of Nothing I can make money from, so I’m not being mercenary.

  Since I never called Eddie anything but Eddie in the print version of our romps, only our fellow ETO correspondents knew that the Dame’s breezy sidekick was famously sepulture-voiced Edmond Whitling, then known as “the conscience of radio.” Not unmasking him was what he came to my party to thank me for, so he said, waiting for his gratitude’s full range of meanings from abject to insulting to sink in. By my lights, his own war book, a stentorian thing called The Rough Draft of History, had exactly one joke in it, the dedication: “To my dear wife, who not only kept the home fires burning but let me feed my rough drafts to them when I got back.” Don’t blame Pamita if she never got to his ruminations on Dachau.

  “The Gates of Hell” had paralyzed me until I hit on misrepresenting him as a nameless GI. Then every other element fell into place. We all took shortcuts in those days, and I suppose using Eddie gave me the clutchable point of familiarity I needed to get on with it. In my defense, as I’d reminded Bill in Chasen’s, everyone could have been anyone. Eddie hadn’t been quite Eddie—or even Edmond Whitling, his other masquerade—since we came upon the death train.