by Carson, Tom
Still, the fate of Proscenium tells the story. With his passion for seeing history resurrected on film, my husband hadn’t abandoned his fantasy of Lazarusing unpreserved great moments in theater after Jake turned him down. Far from it, since he now had the goad of proving Jake wrong. They could be competitive, those two, and a line in Jake’s letter describing the male after-hours Frans—“But I’ll go back if Pam wants to, since she might enjoy it”—had left Gerson peculiarly irked.
He reworked and polished his brainstorm; he got Orson Welles’s phone number. He set his mouth firmly and went back to his desk with Welles’s rumbling laughter still in his ears. I’m afraid even his wife, descending from Haroun Pam-Raschid’s study with her brain still orgiastic and modulating with difficulty to an environment where other people breathed and spoke, had begun to find Gerson’s hope comical. Even if the silly thing ever got broadcast, it could hardly make up for all the slop and crud, Rik and Kuk, I-scrims and you-scrims surrounding it.
Yet when Proscenium did reach the air, it was no ratings disaster. Done in only by the wane of live TV, it ran three years and is ranked among the highlights of what Tim swears is called the medium’s Golden Age. The only one disgraced was Gerson. What’s worse is that he was under few illusions from the moment One Eye gave its blessing and Gene thanked him for not giving up.
Six p.m. was early for me to relinquish Glory Be, but I wanted to watch the Democratic convention. As I came downstairs, Gerson was bidding his masseuse adieu: “I’m sorry, Mrs. Clydesdale. I’ll try to do better next time.”
“Bad day in Bearbank, darling?” I asked as Ursula clopped down the sidewalk. By then, whether he’d gotten pummeled at work or at home, Gerson’s smile and his wince were inseparable.
“Most people would say not. Proscenium’s a go.”
“Oh, my God! Which play do they start with?”
“Sarah Bernhardt in Hamlet. Just as I planned.”
“Then what’s wrong?” Light dawned. “Oh, crap! Who’s the actress?”
He was ashen. “Fran wants an Emmy for drama. She’s crazed.”
Posted by: That’s My Pam
To understand Fran Kukla’s ego—and said ego’s interplay with self-knowledge, self-doubt, self-delusion, and base cunning—is a job for a shrink or a saint. I’m neither, but here’s a tip for any saint or shrink trying. Start with the fact that the big Brentwood bash she threw to celebrate her triumph on Proscenium (“Fran Kukla IS Sarah Bernhardt as Shakespeare’s Hamlet tonite”) took place before the show’s broadcast.
By then—late September? Tim, check if you care—Haroun Pam-Raschid was wild for Glory Be’s imminent appearance in bookstores. As many-eyed Qwertyuiop looked on with arms proudly folded, the pale tender scruff between the virgin’s parting shanks was in view. Nothing Like a Dame had long since devolved to feeling as if it had happened to someone else. But for Gerson’s sake, I put on a print dress and went along to Fran Kukla’s.
Adlai Stevenson was there. Or reputed to be, and tall bald men with weak chins enjoyed sunshine’s spotlight. But I did like the house, a French-windowed and turreted, blancmanged and simpatico echt-Twenties smorgasbord built in silent days by none other than a budding pudding’s favorite moving-picture star, Victor Muet. Relinquished to Gabby Chatterton when The Jazz Singer did Victor’s career in, it was now Fran and Gene’s trophy. By the late Sixties, a rock star had it—and some people will tell you L.A. has no history.
Years earlier, in a book recommended to me as the bleak truth about Hollywood by that old monkey’s paw Claude Estee, who featured in it, I’d come upon a more ominous view of the city’s architectural kickshaw and motley. “Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous,” its author opined, and I knew I was supposed to be impressed. (Isn’t the pretense of compassion marvelous?) But I’m afraid I just grunted “Oh, take a hike, Nathanael” before pitching his rubbish across the Gerson garden at a thrumming, perfectly innocent cicada. Honestly, Panama, what kind of man gets that aghast at droll housing? Is it because it’s unfettered in a way that must threaten him?
Even so, when a Pam stumped for anything to say to Gene Rickey complimented him on the Muet house, he looked wary. Never leaving well enough alone was a Kukla-Rickey trademark, and they hadn’t done anything to it yet. At a loss equal to my own, he offered this: “Well, we’re working on the esplanade.”
“Esplanade?” I said, since I couldn’t see either a likely site or a use for one.
“Yep. Franny’s got a lot of esplanadin’ to do. Don’t you, Fran?”
“Hello, you two. Yeah.” Clutching and munching from a box of chocolates, her hair a bright orange firework, gaunt in a sprigged gown that ill became either a lawn party or her own bony sternum—not that I’d ever been chesty, but I did know what not to emphasize—the most renowned TV comedienne of the Fifties had traipsed up to us.
“Gene, can’t you shut that fucking brat up? I know I sure didn’t invite her,” Fran railed. “Where in hell’s Carmen?”
“Carmen’s busy with Sherry, I think,” said Gene. “Brandy! Go play in the side yard,” he called to a diapered child lost in sobs amid white trousers, tray-hefting waiters, and Democratic donors. “Your mother’s got a lot on her mind today.”
“Damn right I do. Noah, where in hell do you get off?”
“I’m sorry. Off what?” my husband said, meekly but tightening his grip on his drink. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been given one yet, and so much for subtlety.
“Giving Mamie Dwight my old trailer. Is the show called That’s My Lou? That old bitch’ll be screwing my hairdresser next. You watch.”
“Fran, you know perfectly well I don’t handle such things,” Gerson said as I tried hard not to be interested in Gene’s fleetingly reflective look. “It’s in my contract I don’t handle such—”
“Yeah, well. Perfectly well, yeah!” Fran looked wildly around the teeming lawn. “I can’t find him. Gene, what’s that sorry SOB’s name? I’m Fran Kukla, Fran Kukla! Doesn’t that name ring a bell for anyone here? And I’m going to be Sandra Birnam tonight. Am I still a crummy day player back at TKO, for Chrissakes? Is this still that twat Gabby Chatterton’s house and not mine?”
“Sarah Bernhardt,” Gerson murmured in pain, audibly not for the first time. But she’d already stormed off.
Things esplanaded downhill from there. The band kept reprising the That’s My Fran theme, alternating its Gene-composed brassy hopscotch with “Happy Days Are Here Again.” The broad dance floor laid over the mansion’s swimming pool stayed barren. Having failed to pick out the Great Unknown among the guests—five years later, that was still my usual if increasingly idle hobby at big parties, though I couldn’t be sure I’d even recognize her dressed—I played spot-the-Stevenson awhile.
Not that Pam was ablaze to lay eyes on the real one. Gerson and I had duly mailed in our check, and of course voting for Eisenhower—and Nixon!—was unthinkable. But our 1952 fervor in chorusing “You pray, I pray, we all pray for Adlai” had cooled a good bit by the rerun. We’d both frankly been fonder of Estes Kefauver.
My God, Tim: those names. Adlai, Estes, Ike, Milhous! My God, were Gerson and I really facing our third presidential campaign? It honestly hadn’t seemed that long. Dyed-in-the-Loy Democrat or no, Mrs. Gerson or no, the banner on the mansion and the giant poster crowing back from the lawn—the first proclaiming adlai stevenson for president, the second fran kukla is sarah bernhardt as hamlet—suddenly made me feel a mite weary of the Nine-teen Fif-ties.
Gerson had been kidnapped by the One Eye delegation. Victor Muet, fleetingly the only man here I wanted to meet, was long in his grave. Nearby, Fran was loudly explaining her interpretation of the melancholy Dane: “Well, hell! Ghost, my ass. He’s just gone from being a nut people put up with to one they all of a sudden don’t. That’s what’s driving him crazy. Just like all those dopey basta
rds with egg on their tonsils when sound came in.” Carrying a wan bouquet of wildflowers and weeds, her daughter trotted back up. See, Mommie? I went to the side yard.
It’s never pleasant to see one’s own childhood caricatured, especially when the setting’s already grotesque. From now on, my memories of my mother—already stylized by time’s never-leave-well-enough-alone stylus—would be unwelcomely wrenched by moments when she was played by Fran Kukla. When I’d been Brandy Rickey’s age, Warren G. Harding had just died and turned someone named Coolidge into something called a president. I was thirty-six and only Qwertyuiop could bring virgins to my bower.
Needing Gerson to anchor me, I came upon him remonstrating with the actor who played Fran’s husband on her sitcom. Like the rest of the That’s My Fran cast, despite their grumbles, he wasn’t in the Proscenium version of Hamlet, Gerson not being that big a fool. But he’d been roped into this lawn party anyway, like everybody else over whom Fran and Gene had any control.
“Why is it any different, Hy?” Gerson repeated, dumbfounded. “Are you serious? It’s the only country in history—the only one besides this one, but that wasn’t in my lifetime by a long shot—the only country that’s ever been founded on an ideal. Not just some mess of pottage with a flag stuck on top for convenience, an ideal.”
Recognizing the topic, I was less surprised by his vehemence than his audience. He’d told me once that discussing world events with an actor was like talking about the weather to a turtle.
“Yes, yes, yes. I know that,” Hy Lector—the former Hippolite Lecteur—said rapidly. “I think it’s a danger, that’s all. Tell me, when do we learn the difference between ideal and illusion? Ah, oui”—this to a waiter—“gin and tonic, please. When? At death, I suppose.” Then added with a swift glance around him, “Impossible. In that case I’d know it right now.”
“Hy, I didn’t mean to bore you,” Gerson said a bit stiffly.
“Not you, Noah. You’re exempt, I assure you. But between you and me, Lafayette? Comme il en doit rigoler.”
Gerson had no French at all, but the tone gave him the gist, causing his eyes to widen slightly as mine, still unobserved, narrowed. For one of the Marquis’s compatriots to confirm my husband’s Ferris-wheel pessimism was something I and the man I’d dedicated my book to could do without right now, not at the last minute before Glory Be burst into bookstores and changed Gerson’s and everyone’s opinions of everything.
Damn you, Hippolyte Lecteur! Haroun Pam-Raschid wanted to stalk over and reel off chunks of my text at the top of my lungs, but I couldn’t usurp the occasion. This was Proscenium’s day: however dimmed now by Kuklafying, still Gerson’s hope and not mine. I retreated instead to the open-air bar near the covered swimming pool. Ended up waiting in the slow-motion scrimmage there next to one of the imitation Adlais.
Tall, bald, and weak-chinned, he was holding a wan bouquet, which made me think well of him. If I’d been Brandy Rickey, I’d have wanted someone to accept it too, and I decided to thank him by showing some wry solicitude of my own. “You must be sick of people thinking you’re Stevenson,” I said.
“Yes, I am,” he agreed as his voice and the crinkle of a horrifically recognizable smile snapped his face into focus. “I’m just not sure what I can do about it.”
I gaped. “Oh, Governor! I am so sorry.”
“Not at all, not at all. G & T?”
“My God, anything. I mean yes. Oh, please.”
Deftly chucking Brandy’s bouquet under a rhododendron—I only hope she didn’t find it there later—he took his glass and handed me mine. “I don’t think we’ve met. And you might be?”
“Then again I might not,” I pleaded. “I don’t suppose I could tell you I’m Fran Kukla. Could I?”
“I’m sorry. Her I have met. There can’t possibly be two.”
Rather sexily, our eyes seemed to decide no further comment was needed. Taking my arm once I’d said “Pam Buchanan”—not “Pam Gerson,” as usual—he led me away from the bar to the dance floor laid over the swimming pool, a sure indication he wanted to enjoy my company undisturbed.
“Shall we dance?” he asked with eyes twinkling. “The band’s on a break. It’s our chance.”
So it was true he could be seductive. I shook my head, though: “Two left feet.”
“Croquet, then.” He jerked up a mallet from its wheeled rack nearby. “Though I’ve never been sure how you win.”
“You won’t find out today.”
“Two left hands?”
I pointed. “No balls.”
“Are they really so vital? I think not. Perhaps we can fake it.” Surprisingly limber for a man I mistrusted, he swung the mallet at grass. “I’m ahead.”
But I’d recovered somewhat. “Um, Governor? I don’t mean to be rude. Not again! But there’s something I’ve been hoping to ask you.”
“Of course.” The mallet wheeled happily, disturbing some flies.
“It’s that story everyone knows. When the woman called out at one rally, ‘Governor, all thinking people are for you!’ And you said—”
“‘That’s not enough, madam. I need a majority.’ Oh, it’s true. When I said it, the whole room just roared.”
Beaming, he gulped gin and tonic as if briefly confusing it with a dais’s water glass. Then shook a finger he’d freed from his other hand, now a wig-wagging worm above the mallet’s striped pendulum.
“And no, Pam—she wasn’t a plant. That’s been asked many times. No, completely spontaneous! I give myself credit for that.”
“No, that wasn’t—”
I wasn’t sure how to explain. I hadn’t expected to meet him, let alone watch him turn a croquet mallet into a soft-shoe act’s prop on a Brentwood lawn. While thinking most Americans were cretins might be rational in all sorts of circumstances, Fran Kukla’s wingding included, it hadn’t struck Glory Be’s author as a seemly idea to voice—much less to get laughs with in public—by a man asking them for their vote.
To too many of the people unrequited by Ike’s grin I’d heard quoting that crack, I knew the imbecile category included some women miners I’d met in Riceville and a nameless GI who’d made an unknown Dachau inmate laugh with jokes and dumbshow about Spam’s inedibility. I’d told Bill M. in Chasen’s that he couldn’t love them as much now that they weren’t heroic, and God knows I’d often felt the same. But that was a far cry from calling them fools, and neither of us was running for president.
Unhooked from his neck, the mallet was merrily corralling some clouds over his shoulder. “Do you know, after every campaign I’m asked by a publisher to compile my best jokes? Even FDR never got that. Can you imagine walking into a bookstore to ask for ‘The Eisenhower Wit’? Or ‘The Kefauver Wit,’ since I’m among friends he—oh, Lord.”
Clunk. We’d both turned an instant before her knees buckled to see a bewildered Fran Kukla clutch her orange-frizzed head and go crosseyed. Nimbly ditching the mallet, he caught her on one side; ruefully tossing my drink, I grabbed the other. And even though Jack Kennedy was never the thigh-slapping, helpless, roaring-with-laughter type—more New Yorker than Irishman, really—I sure kept him entertained when we shared that table at the Waldorf in spring ’57.
People were coming up fast, but Gene Rickey was fastest. Not only did he size up his wife’s state—goggling, hence conscious—but his eyes quickly flicked from me to Adlai and back before he rushed to take over Pam’s share of our rubber-legged burden. “It’s all right, I’ve got her. If you would, Governor, let’s get her back to the house. Slowly, slowly! Carmen! Chinga the kids. Ice bag! Doctor.”
“I don’t know why she hit me,” Fran moaned.
My own husband’s face in the crowd went from baffled to crumpling. “Pammie, for God’s sake! What—”
“Later!” I said a bit impatiently. “Don’t wo
rry, though, Gerson. It’s all right.”
We left before Stevenson spoke, were told he’d been witty. The reports of Fran’s later behavior sounded mental even for her. But our last sight of Fran Kukla before we tuned in Proscenium that night was forlorn. When we started on foot up the hill to the mansion’s back gate, she’d just emerged from a long gallery’s side door, an ice bag clapped to her head.
Ignoring the tiny daughter who’d wandered to meet her, she made her way through her hordes of oblivious guests as if increasingly surprised and appalled at their numbers. She was wading obliviously toward the American flag that fluttered indifferently over both adlai stevenson for president and fran kukla is sarah bernhardt as hamlet from its tall pole near the top of what sky we could see. The famous first three notes breaking slow and mournful as if to keep pace with her, the band started the That’s My Fran theme.
Posted by: Pam
Even those who agree she was a horror—and Tim Cadwaller seconds me, perhaps more reliably as he never knew her in person—also acknowledge that Fran was a trouper. Well, of course! That’s like saying Napoleon was always a soldier. They had what draftees don’t: motivation.
It’s not just that she did appear as Sarah Bernhardt in Hamlet on live TV that night. When she phoned me a few days later—a definite first, no less definite last—she didn’t apologize for framing me in The Case of The Flying Croquet Mallet. But she did say, “You know I had to. If the story got out it was Adlai who beaned me—”
