by Carson, Tom
“Well! We had a good four months at least, you two. I’m proud of our work, but of course all good things must come to an end.” That was my first hint, confirmed by variants on the same template I saw from a wife’s vantage point on his later productions, that Gerson hadn’t been able to help urging Wylie and me to write the script we had to give himself the bliss of believing such a movie could exist. In fairness to him, you never knew: something might always slip in under the radar.
“Anyhow! We’re tag-teaming this. That’s the word from on high,” he told us. “Pam Buchanan, I’d like you to meet your new alter egos. Wylie, you must know them by now.”
Because some people’s faces hurl their legends at you even if their preferred publicity photo dates to 1922, I’d known as soon as we walked in that the plump dwarfess in platinum ringlets and kohl-rimmed kewpie-doll eyes on Gerson’s rich couch could only be Bettina Hecuba. Indeed my heart had kicked, since I had no idea what a big disappointment she’d be. (Short version: despite my best efforts, I never got Bettina to consider the possibility that I might be, well, Pam! Potential kindred spirit, fellow voyager. More Hollywoodized than her bubbly books let on, she had no interest in meeting anyone like her.) The man doing his best to make his share of the couch look like a pleasure boat’s flying bridge was another curdled old hand turned monkey’s paw, Claude Estee.
“Bettina, you’re the wizard.” Gerson’s lips crimped with what he later admitted—to me, not the room at large—was a renewed awareness she revolted him. “How do you see the problem?”
“This thing you’ve got here is a hemorrhoid that wants to be a trapezoid,” she said. “It’s all here, there, Anzio, whatnot, Paris, craziness, dead people we never met when they were vertical and cannot give a fig about. What I see is the old triangle. Bill and this Eddie, sure we change the names. Which one’s she going to end up with?”
“And we lose Italy,” Claude Estee said. “We get all three of ’em to Merrie Olde, then bang, on to France. Frolics ensue.”
“But that never happened,” I protested. “I only ever saw Bill in Italy. And Lord knows, we never—”
“Lesson One,” said Bettina, acknowledging me at last but only as an intruder. “Nothing. Ever. Really. Happened. If you ever say that to me again, you’d better learn to say it in Chinese. It’ll do as much good and you’ll have a new party trick when you head back East.”
“So who does she end up with?” Gerson asked. Though I was staring madly in all directions, I think I caught his eyes flicking away from me as he did. I was too squirmy about hearing her answer to pay much mind.
“We argued, but I like this Eddie. Reason? She and this Willie or Joe or whatever are the same age. Babes in the woods—wah, wah. Enough with the diapers. He can’t teach her much and what audiences like is a broad being taught. Eddie’s older, got more seasoning. I see Gable.”
“We aren’t quite at that stage yet,” said Gerson. “Anything else?”
“Yes. All these exteriors,” Claude Estee said. “I don’t know if you’ve even had this script budgeted, Noah—”
“No, we haven’t.”
From the “I knew it” glances Claude exchanged with Bettina, I gathered this was an interesting admission. “You know it’s impossible,” Claude went on. “Primo, this ain’t Birth of a Nation. Deux, Bettina and me don’t do the great outdoors.”
“The goddam war was outdoors,” I protested. “What about the fucking war?”
“Kung pao, foo yong, chow mein,” crooned Bettina. “Chiang Kai-shek,” she added with relish.
“Lesson Two,” Claude informed me. “They know how that ended.”
“Damn right,” my neighbor guffawed. Wylie’d never pretended he had any loyalty to the script or to much but his paycheck.
“All right. There’s a lot more to do. But I think we’ve come to a meeting of the minds, as my dear wife would say.”
Once I knew Gerson better, I knew how he’d been suffering. With his passion for seeing history resurrected on film, you could say he was fluent in kung pao. He’d been forcing himself not to speak it to protect his position, and remember: the imaginary movie he’d gotten Wylie and me to write had meant more to him than to me. I’d already lived it, written some of it in Regent’s, mocked some more of it in Nothing, and profited all three times. Gerson was the purist, not me.
“This’ll work out, Pam,” he told me bravely. Also wrongly, but still. “I know it’s a lot for you to digest. But these three know what they’re doing.”
“Yeah, we do,” Bettina snorted in the polished corridor—to Wylie, I noticed, not Claude. “If he did, we’d all be in gravy.”
Posted by: Pam
“Who’s Gerson’s dear wife?” I interrupted Wylie as he started to brief me on our new subordinate roles the next Monday.
“You don’t know? Oh, of course you wouldn’t. Stella Gerson, née Negroponte. Older than him, I think—she was a publicist here for years. She was in Carole Lombard’s plane crash,” he said and looked impressed. “That crack of his was darker than I thought, and I’m good.”
“I thought Carole Lombard was in Carole Lombard’s plane crash.”
“So were twenty-odd other people, Peg,” Wylie reminded me. “That must make it hard on Gerson. I know it did on Stella’s friends. All over town, it was ‘Carole Lombard, my God! Oh God, we’ve lost Carole Lombard.’ Not that Carole Lombard, Carole Lombard, Carole Lombard didn’t deserve it. You know she was the best of us by miles. I know for a fact Stella G. thought so too.”
“Were you one?” I meant one of Gerson’s wife’s friends.
“Stella? I’d have sold her out in a handclap. But I did like her, yes. Sorry to see her go that way, her demotion to ‘among others’ in the papers the next day included.”
Having just spied a heel’s Achilles heel, I wondered if he’d say the same of me if I flew into a mountain with someone better known. Too bad Wylie White (d. 1980) has long predeceased me, his credits petering into sitcoms and silence in the mid-Sixties and his long Hollywood novel unpublished.
Be that as it may, when Pam eventually laid eyes on a photo of the first Mrs. Gerson, I felt obscurely relieved we looked nothing alike. No mystery he’d cherished her, but my husband knew when people are gone. Her picture was right out in the open in our den. I saw no reason to move it.
I hadn’t come upon a locked room that held fifty more lit by tapers. I wasn’t urged to do my hair like her—and good luck there, Antoine of Beverly Hills—or consider work as a publicist. I hope you share my relief, bikini girl, since it’d be a shame if I had to gum up what l’équipe hopes is a reasonably entertaining daisysdaughter.com post with that sort of drivel. It’s the bane of all Hollywood fiction, for all I know including Lost Weekends Under the Volcano. Wylie never showed me a sentence.
As for our own sow’s purse from a cow’s ear, nearly all Nothing Like a Dame’s new script shared with its predecessor was its title. That eventually went too. Gerson did his best to look regretful when he told our quartet at one story conference that Rodgers and Hammerstein had pulled their considerable Hollywood clout to scotch the title despite Pam’s earlier copyright.
“Hey, fuck you, Richard. I got there first,” I muttered. “Are you really that possessive about your shirts?”
“I’m sorry, Pam?”
“Nothing. Nothing, like a dame.” Privately, however—yes, we were an item by then—Gerson and I agreed it was just as well. At least The Gal I Left Behind Me had no association with me.
The way tag-teaming worked was that Bettina and Claude, old monkeys’ paws at construction and Wylie’s and my bosses in all but name, would rough out a sequence and messenger it down the hall for us to tart it up into dialogue. Then they’d rework our version by plugging in road-tested jokes from their earlier movies, which plagued Wylie mostly because he didn�
��t have the stature to crib old jokes from his. Then they’d decide the whole outline was wrong, reshuffling scenes as carelessly as Imelda Marcos sorting shoes before they put us to work on new ones to fill the gaps they’d just created. Even granting The Gal was one of the worst movies of 1949, the wonder is that it wasn’t one of the worst of 1965.
I found Pam had a knack for claptrap, which possibly should’ve worried me but didn’t. (Youth is resilient, old age couldn’t care less. Middle age is doubt’s swamp.) The process had so little connection to anything I’d learned to call writing, let alone my own life, that I responded to it as a light-hearted transformational game. Soon I’d even learned to sling the one unanswerable argument in story conferences: “The audience will go for it.” Since nobody in Hollywood is an audience and no member of a real one believes himself or herself to be an interchangeable cog, what gave any of us a claim to insight beats me, but it was never challenged.
That said, I could still get three pairs of eyes to roll heavenward by betraying my ignorance of basic rules. And with no regrets, not in the case I’m thinking of. At one caffeine-fiendish meeting at which Gerson was present, Bettina, Claude, and Wylie were wrangling over the latest plot hole ripped open by tag-team genius, namely how to dramatize Chet Dooley’s discovery that Eddie Harting was The One writ purple in Peg Kimball’s heart. If nothing else, I was grateful my Anzio Bobbsey twin’s new cognomen was in place, as I had honestly cringed at hearing them all call him Bill. Even Gerson, whose voice I otherwise enjoyed.
Nor was I sorry Pam was now Peg, as Wylie had presciently christened me. Of the three of us—and by now I could hardly remember the kung pao that in the real ETO, Bill, Eddie, and I had never been a “we”—only Eddie had kept his first name, simply because everyone except me liked it. Anyhow, they were tossing around stupid ideas: for instance, a letter home to my “parents” Chet might guiltily read before posting it. I wondered briefly if it was worth turning Chinese to bring up the kung pao of a polo accident on Long Island and a Browning in Brussels.
“Oh, shut up, all of you,” I said instead from the couch. I’d taken over Wylie’s recumbent posture, since around Bettina and Claude he sat up. “Why can’t he just spot me coming out of Eddie’s room the night the Bulge starts?”
Not to pat myself on the back, but silencing Bettina Hecuba was no job for an amateur. Or maybe one only for amateurs. “For God’s sake, Pam!” said Gerson. “We can’t even hint you were fucking.”
Unlike me, he wasn’t foul-mouthed. Indeed I rarely heard him use the word in the all-purpose and flavorful adjectival incarnation that all of us this side of Omar Bradley had learned to deploy in the war. He was just respecting convention. Except possibly in private, “fucking” was all anyone in Hollywood called sex.
I sat up. “Jesus Christ, that’s all we ever did do. Kung pao, foo yong, chow mein,” I added, whirling on Bettina. “Chiang Kai-shek! Chen-chen,” which didn’t quite come out of nowhere: those kewpie-doll eyes had just reminded me of the Lotus Eater’s. Then I saw my future husband’s face.
So, I’m afraid, did everyone else. And—“I’m sorry, Gerson,” I said witlessly. “I thought you knew.”
Was it his inadvertent declaration or mine that settled things? We often tenderly bickered about it. In any case, that night Gerson asked me to dine à deux for the first time since our French lunch: at Musso & Frank’s, later our marital favorite, which incidentally proved he had no intention of keeping us under wraps. His goodnight gesture was a dry but lengthy kiss.
A couple of days later, in my suite at That Hotel, kisses were succeeded by mutually shy—we mostly kept it under wraps—but satisfactory fucking. Yet the gesture this old bag still holds in her heart is that Gerson didn’t propose until after Variety announced the next spring that The Gal was a box-office bomb.
Posted by: Pam
After thinking Seattle and Bangor had a rare treat in store, I’d almost forgotten the goal of all this nonsense was to ship something to theaters. Hence my surprise when one day that fall—the temperature doesn’t drop, but everyone can feel summer’s bored air lift and go bother Ecuador, taking its shed snakeskin along and leaving a tenderer shimmer behind—our tag-team quartet’s latest wad, chartreuse by now in Metro color-coding, came back with the pashas’ magic endorsement: conditionally approved for production.
“It’s just another movie now,” said Gerson with a hint of reprieve. Cigaretted and bare-chested, his body paler than Pam’s was by then, he was still hopelessly, sniffably, uniquely, and hence adorably Gerson. “I’m sorry, Pammie. You’re well out of it.”
“I’m through? Pink-slipped? Time to start packing my bags?” Meet my first unmistakably Hollywoodized thought: unless I wanted to start footing the bill for this suite myself, we’d have to find someplace else for our fucking.
“Oh, you and all this are still on the budget. So’s Wylie. That is, I convinced the pashas to renew his contract.”
“You know he’s a wreck, don’t you?”
“Everyone does and him better than most. But I owe him for when Stella died. He identified—well, whatever was left. If I had, I’d still be gibbering.”
A passenger on a plume of cigarette smoke, a rare ghost of mangled Stella Gerson, née Negroponte, curled upward to rejoin Carole Lombard. Then it dissipated. “Chen-chen,” Gerson said.
Plucked from Pam’s memories in story-conference extremis, the cry to the dealer to start the next game was already one of our codes. “Chen-chen,” I murmured back.
True to its Chinese nativity, its meaning altered with inflection too. “Oh, Pammie! Do I have time?”
“You’d better make some,” snuggling Pam told his ear. So tucked and folded, corpuscle-crammed, peculiarly and proudly vulnerable. So oddly like the anus in reverse of our brains’ publicly displayed, disgustingly exposed digestive systems. To spare you any more detail regarding the images that used to pop into Pam’s mind unprompted, see Tim Cadwaller, “The Holocaust as Pornography,” in You Must Remember This. His not unastute guesswork makes a natural sequel to the chapter that precedes it, “The Holocaust as Sacrament.”
Not least because I kept such Hieronymian bosh from Gerson, a few pink slipups over the years aside, the fucking was satisfactory. “Oh! You should know,” he said with a proud chuckle as he dressed. “This is mildly interesting. I think we’ve cast you.”
They had, but I didn’t meet the young New York stage actress recruited to play Peg Kimball until her wardrobe tests. It was the moment when the phoniness turned real and kung pao fled for good.
We were supposed to pose together for a studio photographer. Turning a corner, I ran head-on into a sparkling gal in the identical correspondents’ uniform I’d worn in the ETO, from cunt cap and shoulder flash to constantly tugged skirt and low-heeled, slightly clunky pumps.
I think they’d cheated on the stockings; ours were never that sheer. More saliently, I’d never had a nose that daringly darling, lips as ripe, or eyes anything so radiant. My blue-gray ones were attractive, but they were weather, not live gems, and Antoine would go to his grave unable to convert my brindle mop into her shiny bob. She was also a good few inches shorter than me, making her, I suppose, Peg Kimball’s exact height.
“Oh, I know it’s confusing!” she said with a silvery giggle, perhaps aware the claim flattered me. “Let’s get ourselves sorted out here and now. We’re both Peg, but you’re Pam. And I’m Eve.”
As I hope my readers if any appreciate, I try to avoid cliches. Still, they really do say this in Hollywood: “We’re ready for you now, Miss Harrington,” someone called.
Yes.
Posted by: Eve Harrington’s Pal
Yes, though my dearest Hollywood friend’s biographers generally hurry past her flop screen debut—often casually indicting Gerson, to both Pam’s and Eve’s fury, as the hack that gentle man wasn’t. The Ga
l I Left Behind Me was the movie she outraged Broadway by coming West to make mere days after she’d collected The Theatuh’s prize trophy for starring in Footsteps on the Ceiling. Given The Gal’s reception, it’s astounding she didn’t bolt back to the stage by the next train.
As movie fans know, she didn’t. From her saucy success in Red Ridingwood’s film of Footsteps and then Charles Eitel’s Saints and Lovers to her haunting job as abandoned Queen Disa in John Wilson’s much Oscared adaptation of Shade’s marvelous A Distant Northern Land, her career after The Gal was all mistletoe and laurels. Contradicting the fables told against her in New York, she never once except teasingly reproached Gerson or me for making her screen debut such a dud.
Out of touch with Addison DeWitt since I’d come West, I hadn’t even known he was married to her, an eyebrow-raising break with form for him. But I was delighted when he came out to the Coast himself and they set up housekeeping in the hills above Malibu. Unabashed at living off his wife’s earnings—“Good Lord! So did God,” he crowed, flourishing a hand at our dazzling surroundings—and amusing himself by sporting atrocious Hawaiian shirts in their sun-medallioned garden as he chatted with servants in the most debonair pidgin Spanish I’ve ever heard, he tucked cigarette holder in mouth and went back to writing the taut, spiky poetry he’d begun with, producing three slender books critics called almost Shadean as well as my second-favorite memoir after The Producer’s Daughter, the jaunty An Apple for My Eve. By the time he died in ’72, prompting his wife’s retirement from pictures, I doubt most people even knew he’d once been Manhattan’s silkiest, nastiest drama critic.
