Free Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane by Tom Carson

before booze began playing Rodin, he’d been married for a while to none other than Celia Brady, whose memoir The Producer’s Daughter I’d tormented Alisteir Malcolm by reviewing so rhapsodically for the old Republic in another life. But I never got to meet Wylie’s ex, not even to thank or spank her for her answering praise of Nothing Like a Dame .As I learned from my first eager inquiries while scanning the room at Hollywood parties, she’d moved to Arizona on doctors’ orders shortly before I reached the West Coast. So my flickering hunch we’d get along like long-lost sisters never got tested outside print: two slim books whose dust jackets (hers annoyingly pictureless) I had a tendency to catch for years peering up side by side each time I unpacked my library.
    If not Celia, then I’d hoped to be teamed with Bettina Hecuba, whose credits went back to Griffith and who’d won one o f l iterary Manhattan’s rare dispensations from charges of whoring in the California sun. Smart as a tick, she kept in New York’s good graces by impersonating an unrepentant golddigger; I knew I had it made w hen Dame ’s first reviewer compared it to Bettina’s expertly addlepated Now and Then, There’s a Girl Such as I . Horrified by the thought of two women, neither one shackled to Hollywood (Bettina at least kept five pert toes wiggling East), witching it up on their payroll, Metro’s preference was for a male’s wise hand. Or wise back, my usual view of Wylie as he slept off the three double martinis that had washed down an elephant’s idea of too few peanuts at lunch.
    We got along like gangbusters when he was sleeping, not too badly when he pawed himself awake. Overseeing three other movies’ progress at the time, Gerson had given us marching orders whose fundamental irrelation to reality I was too new to Hollywood to appreciate. Once I did, I understood how men of his caliber might put up with peddling treacly illusions to the public for the sake of the interludes when they got to enjoy the more gallant illusions they’d cooked up for themselves.
    Gerson was no hack, far from it. He was a man deeply fired by earnest beliefs, including that movies could and should be better. He’d admired my war reporting, and far from bemoaning “The Gates of Hell”’s inclusion in Dame ’s first printing, he told me I should’ve done that all the way through—interlarding each chapter of comedy with “The Angel of Anzio,” “Bacchanapoli,” “The Day the Tide Ran Red,” “Tiger! Tiger!,” and my other ETO pieces for Regent’s .
    “They’re both true!” he told Wylie and me firmly. “And if we can make an audience see they’re both true, they’re both always true—the slapstick, the horror, yes? Yes?—then I think we end up showing them that this was a very American kind of war. Unless, Pam, you’re really from Winnipeg.”
    “The truth is she’s really from Winnipam,” said Wylie. “Peg is her name. I love how he says ‘American,’” he went on once Gerson had left. “It’s like hearing a virgin say ‘Cunt.’ Say it often enough and open sesame, the Great Bush will appear.”
    “Oh, I like it,” I said.
    “Cunt? So do I. No wonder you wish I was Bettina. That’s the reason I drink, you know. I’d never touched a drop until you—”
    “No, you jackass. The way it matters to him.”
    “It does,” said Wylie shortly. “But I’ve been around longer than he has, Peg, and one thing I know about Hollywood is that it takes a very smart man to be a real idiot. I’m only a mildly smart man. I’m perfect.”
    “You must’ve cared about something once. Just for me, can’t you pretend? I promise I won’t be in Los Angeles long.”
    “I amAmerican. I don’t need to.”
    I decided to ignore his implication Passaic wasn’t in the U.S.A., and we settled down to reconciling the Pam Buchanan of Regent’s with Nothing ’s Dame, little knowing—all right, Wylie probably did—she’d turn into