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

by Carson, Tom

  “I am California,” the Great Unknown’s bare skin had whispered as we stood side by side. “I’m sun, money, plenitude, joy. I was the victory in the war that you saw and the proof is I know nothing of it. I’m the reason you came here and the champagne that kissed you when you came down the ramp, and you should have listened to both poets you know. We are all creatures and the rest is verbiage. Here I am. What we might have done if you’d accepted my sun tea wouldn’t have bound you to any future at all, don’t you see? We’d both have been back in our lives before midnight. But you might have had a few naked hours as the Pam you most dream of—still, still—before it was too late, since youth is the one god I, California, have been cursed by my makers from Cortez to Metro to kneel to. You can’t have everything, can you?”

  My one gesture indicating I’d like to broker a compromise was fairly pathetic. Once I’d tipped the sand from my shoes, I didn’t put them back on, walked back up to my car with them hung from the hand Gerson’s script had been in and hot asphalt and mica bits searing my soles. How my eyes scoured those hooded pink houses as I walked past them on the burning road, numberless, cuneiform, cruciform—oh, drat.

  I loyst her.

  2. Glory Be

  Posted by: Pambidextrous

  I know, daisysdaughter.com readers if any: this is certainly adding up to quite the Guinness-bound amount of verbiage for an online suicide note. The more so as Pam’s second D-Day is still in Leopoldinely robust bloom outside my window.

  People who only own digital clocks don’t know what a glad little company of mimes they’re missing. Watching two p.m. perform its sailorlike semaphore just now, I thought what I often do: Ned Finn’s hour. Bridge signalman on the Maloy off Omaha, remember? Spared only by a premature death from witnessing his and dear Nan’s strange son’s career as a disturbingly licentious creator of comic books derived from his upbringing in what he calls the superpower diaspora.

  To think that when I knew him as a child in Nagon, all that brat cared about was The Longest Day. Ned and Nan’s paperback copy looked like a card deck afflicted with leprosy (the climate’s doing, not Sean’s, just so I won’t be misunderstood) by the time Ambassador Cadwaller’s wife replaced it with her own. I suppose we can count ourselves lucky he’s moved on, puberty no doubt a big help on that front.

  Tim Cadwaller thinks highly of Sean’s stapled output, from Lovely Sybil, Meter Maid to Cynthia’s Icicles and The Brothers Vane. To my imperfectly concealed dismay, they’ve even discussed collaborating on some sort of fairy-tale saga stuffed with souvenirs and fantasies of what used to be called the American Century, disguised as some implausible relic’s bleats and croons from the good old Titanic’s engine room. Can’t say as I’ll regret not being around for that one should it materialize, thanks to Cadwaller’s gun putting paid to my memories of the real thing at long last.

  As for Pam’s birthday fecundity, what I can I say? After a lifetime as a writer of, Dame aside, more or less careful prose, I do feel a mad glee at yoicksing on without a second look. It’s probably obvious to anyone who knows writing that I’m not in it for the style, much less the sneaky bracketing of surface randomness into a gunsight’s hatchmarks that always lets my betters claim the reader pulled the trigger. That doesn’t mean these fat-lunetted mimsies and rheumatic fingers of mine would so terribly mind a bit of encouragement from you mysteries out there. Still no comments when I homepage, and would it really kill you to chime in with a kind or unkind word?

  But even if you’re Panama, please don’t try to dissuade me from using her great-grandfather’s gun. With or without the White House’s telephonic Potus ex machina, I can’t think of a single argument or unlikely promise of transcendence this bloodstained beachball could offer that would tempt me to wake up in one piece on June 7—or D Plus One, as it was in 1944. The blog sent forth can never be recalled, Chekhov was right about pistols, and daisysdaughter.com will have wasted your time if you don’t see a mess of pink and gray things on the rug at the end. Finito, dans le tapis sanglotant.

  In the meantime, disbelieve l’équipe’s wordflow if you like. If I were sailing under literature’s skull and crossbones, I could point to those tales Conrad’s Marlow ostensibly starts telling after dinner and continues as the coffee grows first cold, then moldy, then unchucked only because the Malayan houseboy has died of old age. As I’m inputting in real time, my preferred example is nonfiction: I Was Dolly Haze’s Monster, initially titled The Confessions of a White Widowed Male and meant for an exclusively diagnostic audience before its editor, one Dr. John Ray, saw reason in the form of paperback greenbacks. Gerson and I once shared a table with that dull man at the Gene Kellys’.

  On the drive home, we agreed it was extraordinary that someone could have sat across a table from the now notorious “H.H.” and be so unperfumed by either magic or cyanide. In town to visit his brother Nick, all Dr. Ray wanted to talk about was the book’s screen chances. Don’t blame Gerson for being evasive. Typically, my warmhearted husband was more curious about whether the poor little girl really had died in childbirth—which was when, interestingly, Dr. Ray grew evasive.

  Though I was kind enough to murmur a hard-won warning (“Charades”) once coffee and dessert showed up, I’m a writer. I was most fascinated by the introduction’s claim that the perp had dashed off the whole incredible Taj Mahal in fifty-six presumably harried days. Nicholas Ray’s boring brother assured me it was true, and I know I’m not in the same league as a stylist or nostalgist. Nonetheless, if Dr. Ray’s patient could do his thing in that timespan, you’d better believe Daisy Buchanan’s daughter can do my lesser mine in this.

  Posted by: Pam

  Nothing emblazons the Fifties notoriety of I Was Dolly Haze’s Monster like Gerson’s familiarity with it. My husband read very little but history in his non-Metro hours. In Stella Negroponte’s room, as I thought of the den, a whole wall was grimmed up by what Civil War buffs know simply as the O.R.: the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion. Its 128 volumes contained every scrap about every scrap from Grant’s after-action report on Fort Donelson to Lee’s lost message at Sharpsburg.

  To either flank, more bookcases massed reinforcements. Presidential biographies, books on the Revolution and the Founding Fathers, the opening of the West and the mind of the South. During too much of my second marriage, Pam’s mute nickname for Parkman, Catton, and Beard was Winken, Blinken, and Nod.

  As you may’ve recognized, Gerson’s bent was American. Wylie White had pegged him as an unrequited wooer, and I’m afraid the future mimsy borogoves had a mite or mote of condescension in them as well. However jostled Pam’s unbringing, I was a near Mayfloral member of the old circus troupe. Jamestown on the Fay side, dimly related on the paternal to none other than James Buchanan—our fifteenth President, Panama, and quite the worst until recently. The DAR’s wastebasketed importunings made our mailman sweat even before Glory Be came out.

  Indifferent to that heritage at thirty, I was bemused by Gerson’s attachment to squabbles, warbles, and battles that had been legislated, warbled, and turned into sculpture’s equine equanimity well before his own Ellis-aliased clan’s arrival during Teddy—not Franklin—Roosevelt’s Presidency. But could I really have assumed his motives were social, proof I didn’t know my man worth beans? Still horridly alert to distinctions between Mayflora and Mayfauna, which Dachau had horridly honed instead of obliterating, I did know that caring in earnest about which Adams came first was no way to blend in.

  “Honestly, Gerson,” I told him when he corrected me. “It just doesn’t matter all that much to us.”

  “Oh, Pammie!” he said fondly but shrewdly. “Have the grace to say ‘me.’”

  “If you care, then why don’t you care about Europe? Since you don’t.” I introduced bookshelves.

  “We did! And look where that got us.”

  “We didn’t and lo
ok where that got us,” I raged obscurely.

  “Let’s make a new rule,” said Gerson. “No plurals.”

  “That’s a good one,” I agreed with affection. All his best insights were terse. “Much better than the silly one about no studio gossip after sunset.”

  He smiled. “It’s all right, Pam. That one was conditional. To be honest, I meant the boulevard.”

  Posted by: Pam

  Not that we knew it, but Gerson’s ulcer-sparing Boulevard Rule—its new name, cited whenever I came from Beverly Hills to collect him—would be obsolete in under two years. Unlike most Hollywoodites, Gerson refused to treat television as Goneril to the big screen’s Lear. The more stymied he grew at Metro, the more the new medium brought out his idealism.

  At dinners and even breakfast, he’d lecture Judas-eyeing stars and execs—and then Pam, more indulgent but no more convinced—about TV’s educational wonders, magical accessibility (“Look, Pammie. Fran’s on. Why don’t we get in the car, fight traffic for an hour, and drive to the living room? You see?”), and best-of-both-worlds blend of privacy and community. Democracy, too: “Let people turn up their noses. Thomas Jefferson wouldn’t have. I trust Jefferson more.” Once he dragged Jefferson in, I should’ve known then and there he was going to quit Metro for Rik-Kuk Productions, the Burbank-based company owned by grimace queen Fran Kukla and her husband, Gene Rickey.

  Even after the reality had failed his hopes—and I can’t imagine I’m spoiling anyone’s idea of suspense on that score—he stayed scornful of the old screen’s gibbering hostility to the new. We were good chums after our divorce, swapped many letters with international postmarks. I recall one of his from ’58 that spent half a page of its friendly three excoriating Hollywood’s gaudy depiction of the tube-fueled rise of a folksy demagogue.

  To Gerson’s now uninvolved but still perceptive eyes, A Face in the Crowd’s pose as a political warning was hogwash. Its hysteria’s real fuel was movieland’s hatred of television, “and the real joke is that the jealousy’s political,” he wrote. “They know Lear buckled to McCarthyism—and Goneril was the dragon slayer. Goneril, not Cordelia. Cordelia was just literature.”

  Buckle they had, and ingloriously too. Hollywood’s one overt protest against the witch hunt predated Pam’s time: the planeload of movieland luminaries, Bogart among them, who boldly flew to Washington to stick up for our First Amendment rights. Exercised them again by recanting, Humphrey Dumpty included, as soon as they got back to the Coast. By my second wedding day, covert protests were the rule.

  Those included Gerson’s own. He hired a lot of blacklisted writers under pseudonyms, not only at Metro—everyone knew “Kent Clark’s” super screenplay for Lean Over the Bridge was really Wayne Bruce’s cowled attack on serving more than one master—but to cook up TV scripts once he’d moved behind his more spacious desk at Rik-Kuk. Thanks to Gene Rickey, that was also when the Boulevard Rule became the Cahuenga Rule, though Pam’s new Olds nosed its way to the Valley to pick him up less often than her old convertible had in Culver City days. Since most of our dinner invites were still in Los Angeles, it made more sense for him to come down to me.

  Of course, the actors who got named by Pat Carpet and others were out of luck. Unlike Greek tragedians or typewriter-chained trick or treaters, they couldn’t don masks. Even though Potusville is spiky with comparisons, it’s hard to explain what the blacklist felt like. My advice to Tim Cadwaller, which I’m still fairly pleased with, was that any Hollywood histories of the period that focus on the plague are accurate as to our mood. Those that ignore it are equally so.

  Doublethink, Orwell called it. I imagine the years of the blacklist were a lot like the worst AIDS years if you were heterosexual yourself but had friends at risk. With practice, you could switch without forethought from gloom to frivolity a half dozen times while crossing a room at the Kellys’.

  Gerson often ended up trailing behind me, since he knew dozens and dozens of people affected; I only a few from my past. One of Dat Dead Man Dere’s saddest chapters describes Bran’s bellicose arrival in Washington, vowing to tell the HUAC to go fly a kite before a clerk explains he’s been dropped from the witness list. (“The Chairman wasn’t sure who I am, hey? Well, I know who he is, God damn it,” blustered Murphy, there being reporters about.) When the subpoena came, Hans Caligar decamped back to Germany and joined Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble.

  Even Jake Cohnstein’s brush with the witch hunt was minor. Hoping to stay on in Washington after the war, he got turned down for a job with the new CIA and could guess the reason or reasons. Hence Jake Cohnstein, Professor of Drama at Whitaker College in Chambersburg and author (1954) of It Was All Theater: From Brannigan Murphy to the Moscow Show Trials.

  Good book, incidentally. Much as I lamented Jake’s turn to the right in public and private, it was legitimate, and he Jakishly alienated Red-hunting yahoos by wrapping up Theater with a “review” of McCarthy’s Senate subcommittee that judged its hearings purely as neo-Muscovite drama: prefiguring my recognition of the Murphy Channel as Bran’s right-wing triple doppelganger, “Comrade Joe” was his title. I not only enjoyed our one campus debate but wish we’d had more, since getting fizzy and fuzzy with him before and after was so entertaining.

  He and Gerson got along, too. On our New York trips in the Fifties—Bloomie’s for me back when it was unique, Fourth Avenue’s used bookshops for him back when they were plentiful—Jake was our usual dinner companion unless we had to attend some Metro or later Rik-Kuk and network frouhaha. Too proud to recruit a prop female and too guarded to introduce pals with real beards, he made us a trio, never a quartet. Partly just to reassure myself she’d survived Dachau, I’d have liked to see Sharon Halevy Cohnstein again, but that warm woman had grown more reluctant than ever to leave her Williamsburg nest.

  Their son David, the B-17 waist gunner whose invisible presence in a Manhattan courtroom had made Jake’s testimony unimpeachable, had been shot down in the first big raid on Schweinfurt just two months after Murphy v. Murphy wrapped up. If Sharon had asked, I’d’ve had no choice but to tell her what I knew about the end product when a parachute—I hoped not made in Scranton—failed to open. She wasn’t the type, but I’d met a few.

  Their wryness together surprised me at first: Jake and Gerson’s, I mean. Now matter how dwindled from militance to mild mindset, Gerson’s sympathies were firm enough to normally leave him constrained around harsh anti-Communists. Maybe New York gave him license, as if the witch hunt was only happening—though of course it wasn’t—out on the Coast. Besides, though my husband was ten years Jake’s junior, they’d grown up in similar milieux before Gerson moved to L.A. in the Thirties. When Jake asked why, my husband told him more than he ever did me: “I just felt too many people had already had the life I would’ve had if I stayed. You know the feeling.” Jake agreed he did.

  They shared the same Thirties cosmology: Scottsboro boys, Kirov’s murder. Jake enjoyed demonstrating he hadn’t forgotten his Trotskyite days, just as Gerson liked showing off he hadn’t forgotten his East Coast ones. Why be evasive, though? The spark of their shared amusement was as plain as the shiksa between them from our very first dinner at some Italian place in the Village.

  Not the usual Hollywood visitor’s idea of fine dining, but Gerson loathed “21.” “When I’m eating a meal, I like to be on firm ground as a diner,” he told me. “I don’t like to moonlight as the maitre d’.” There any pasha from Metro’s New York office or, later on, network bigwig could interrupt our meal on a whim, stopping my patient husband’s fork or coffee cup with box-office this and ratings that. And Pam had no objections, since “21” was predictably the Lotus Eater’s favorite lair under Eisenhower.

  As two Gersons goodnighted one Whitaker prof, Jake laughed. “Take good care of our Pam, Noah, please,” he said. “I’m invested, you know! I was her first Jew.” Waved, strolled toward the sub
way—Williamsburg-, not Chambersburg-bound.

  “It just seems unfair!” I told Gerson once we were strolling ourselves. Balmy night for December; we’d only hail a cab when we tired. “I’m your bloody wife and if I so much as mention the word, you look for the pogrom in your martini. But you two—oh, no. You can joke all you like, but heaven forbid I join in.”

  “Minority privilege, Pammie.” Gerson was in a good mood. “It’s the one kind you’ll never enjoy.”

  “Even if I converted?”

  “You’d be a fire engine on a golf course.” Then Gerson looked anxious. “Pammie! Jake didn’t mean, did he…”

  If Jake had, my husband would have been perfectly pleasant, but only if warned. Thanks to the way he’d learned about Eddie Whitling, one rule on New York trips was that I’d never introduce him unadvised to anyone I’d slept with, giving me a fairly sheepish five minutes when I hung up after Roy Charters asked us to cocktails. Unsure of the rule’s rules, I had no idea what I’d do if we ever faced lunching with Dottie Idell, but no Crozdettis were listed in any edition of the Manhattan or even Queens, Brooklyn, Bronx, New Jersey, or Connecticut phone books between 1950 and 1956.

  My turn to laugh, though. “Oh, God, Gerson! No. My name would’ve had to be Paul.”

  That amused him for blocks. He kept calling me Paula for the rest of our stroll and in the cab we flagged down near the Flatiron Building. Kept it up as we spun through our hotel’s door. With new decorum, he stopped when we got in the elevator—just before, needless to say, it might’ve got interesting.

  Posted by: Paula

  Though it was no longer fucking in either temper or name, that side of our lives had stayed satisfactory. We had our signals, our favorite spots around the house and on each other, our understood preludes and aftermaths. No matter how tempted Gerson might be to get dressed or read, he knew I needed five minutes’ Pompeiian stillness before we uncoupled. Especially with Eddie Whitling behind me—well, I had certainly better rephrase that, Ard—Gerson horizontal charmed Mrs. Gerson with the same virtues he had when vertical and clothed: thoughtfulness, humor, paradoxically self-assured diffidence.