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

The Gal. By my next birthday, in spite of my collaborator’s damn near sestinal siestas and morning yawns of “Tell me again about the lighter side of Dachau,” we had a script I liked. Then a schoolboy, Jean-Luc Godard might’ve liked it too—especially the Godard of Les Carabiniers ,one of Tim Cadwaller’s favorites. Even with a Balkan blank like Metro’s Tod Paspartu directing instead, it could’ve made a reasonably good movie, that is if it’d had a snowball’s chance in Trader Vic’s of ever being made.
    Since I didn’t have a clue, I was beginning to enjoy myself. On Metro’s tab, I had a suite—though not bungalow—at That Hotel. Could look down from my window on its pool’s frescoes of paunchy gents toasting at rest, their sunglasses as declarative as a firing squad’s blindfold, among magnificent girls in Newton-defying bathing suits as waiters circulated and bellhops trotted out with plug-inable phones. While you won’t believe it, Panama, in those days a telephone’s status was indicated by its heft and Bakelite sheen, not its resemblance to a metal hangnail.
    Appearing poolside myself, the Hollywood equivalent of a debut at the court of St. James, struck me as both unnerving and a bigger commitment than Pam’s signature on my Metro contract. I’d learned at Anzio, no less, that too much sun turned me freckled and peeling instead of gorgeously tanned, and the Buchanan gams were my only feature that gave me any hope of passing for suitable human scenery. Still, it was either that or binoculars, and after a week, having bought a demure but not wholly unchic tartan two-piece and my own shiny firing-squad blindfold, I wrapped myself in a hotel robe and went down.
    No doubt it’s just Pink Thing’s archives having fun that I recall those with The Naked and the Dead on their laps looking up to trade competitive glares with those starting Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions .Having just about finished John Horne Burns’s The Gallery , I was rather bleakly thinking Napoli had kept a few secrets from the Bobbsey twins when a bellhop startled me by plugging in a phone next to my chaise. It was Gerson asking me to be his dinner date at the Gene Kellys: “I was supposed to be holding Lily Hellman’s hand. Not really her cup of hemlock, but Betsy Blair [then Mrs. Kelly] is doing Another Part of the Forest over at Universal and if you’re Lillian you tend the greensward. But she’s flying back East to nurse Hammett. Thank God,” he added decisively, careful to erase any insult I might feel at being asked so late.
    Odd sightings around the pool or on the Metro lot aside, that soirée was my introduction to Hollywood’s real trick photography: the kind taken by your blinking eyes as familiar screen faces turn 3-D. Yet in a variety of Beverly Hills and Bel Air homes that spring, sometimes as Gerson’s date and sometimes (I had written a bestseller) on my own, I noticed most of them were sheepish about these lesser selves, for lesser they indubitably were. Manhattan magnifies, Los Angeles shrinks; the difference is the sky. One reason actors like living there is that it lets them pretend they’re in proportion.
    Male stars, especially, had overeager manners tinged by worry that a ringer like Pam might know truths fame had denied them about the complex mummery of behaving normally. As they waxed lyrical about tennis or havered after substance by subscribing to Newsweek ,retreating indoors to read it to demonstrate the indifference of an homme sérieux to May’s mesmeric soar, they seemed more victimized than even Murphy by masculine faith that a noble thing called “real life” existed out beyond this palisade of artifice, not a dichotomy to confuse most women in either Monte Carlo or Weehawken. It came out in questing, jousting grins and a positive mania for conversational premature ejaculation, as if guessing what you were about to say did more to prove their bona fides than putting up with listening to