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

it. Not to smash any altars, but the one I’ve got most in mind is Bogart; I’ve never had so many perfectly passable remarks get brutalized before they were halfway out of my mouth by clackingly chopper-proud pseudo-savvy. (“Uh-huh! Those burp guns could cut a man in half.” Well, no: they were .30 caliber, not .50.)
    Yet even the women were likely to worry you’d catch them out somehow, pointing in vindictive triumph (they could fathom no other kind) at the giveaway mistake—the tinsel!—in their otherwise convincing bean dip. At fame, all of them were experts. In ordinary situations, they were as touchingly unsure of whether to act snooty or abashed as centaurs at the Preakness.
    Would you like to know the party game those silly, enchanting people were all sure defined them as regular folk, breaking the ice for newcomers? Charades! Trust me, oh, that’s just the thing to make you feel you’re on an even footing with Gene Kelly, in whose facially mobbed living room I once had to act out Milton’s “Come and trip it as you go/On the light fantastic toe.” But these were Hollywood’s great middlebrow years, when the vogue was to impersonate the Versailles edition of suburbia.
    As always in movieland, one motive was fear. Though McCarthyism was years away from being coined as a term—by Herblock, incidentally, the WashPost ’s op-ed Daumier; in Sean Finn’s pantheon, only Bill M. shares that plinth—and its eponym was still an obscure freshman Senator from Wisconsin, the House Un-American Activities Committee had reached L.A. a year before I did and the Hollywood Ten’s contempt convictions were still on appeal. Since Hollywood’s politics ranged from a balletic pink (the Kellys) to Kremlin red (Pat Carpet, by now as indigenous a transplant as most of Southern California’s flora), it made sense to take cover in aggressive normality.
    His own teenage membership in Passaic’s small chapter (“More the size of a limerick, not that the Irish kids stopped throwing rocks”) of the Spartacist League now a wry memory—“It was mostly a way to meet girls,” he told me, which I knew wasn’t true but knew he wished had been—Gerson was well placed to be kind about it all. “When backing Wallace for President is a show of intransigence, you wonder what Norman Thomas must think,” he murmured one night, backing me in his Packard down a long driveway after we’d heard some drunken hyphenate lecture his shrunken caliphate about Henry’s good sense: the approximate equivalent of praising Nixon’s idealism. “Still, who am I to talk. Pam, can it be you’ve seduced me into voting for Truman?”
    I got you another, Miss Loy. My big advantage was Harry’s decision, ignoring the State Department’s qualms—even Cadwaller, then unknown to me, had thought it was rash—to recognize the new state of Israel. Then we pulled up at That Hotel, where as usual Gerson’s goodnight was confined to the warmest of smiles.
    He took me to parties; sometimes I even asked him. Unless driving time counts, however, we hadn’t gone out à deux since our French lunch. If I thought about it at all, I was operating on the assumption that our social life was purely professional, just as so much of Hollywood’s professional life struck me as purely social.
    When I got to the office next morning, Wylie was recumbent but wakeful on the couch. “What do you know, Peg? They tossed it,” he said, nodding at our script. “Now can we get to work, please?”
    Posted by: Celia Brady’s Sister
    I hadn’t understood anything, since my impression was that once we gave Gerson what he’d asked for, that was the movie Seattle and Bangor would see. Yet even though he had some authority to acquire properties on his own, he wasn’t an independent producer: in lot parlance, a Metro gnome, not a Metro pasha. The pashas had read Wylie’s and my script and vied to mime “By the licking of my thumb, something wicked this way comes” at