Free Girl of My Dreams by Peter Davis

If you looked away from the vacant baby grand for a moment and then looked back, you would see a studio musician had materialized at the keyboard.
    Palmyra smiled her faintly one-sided smile and proceeded to the piano. At parties earlier in her career she had scandalously added blue lyrics that could never be in a movie or on a record. She’d had a hit in 1932 with a song called “Give Me a Chance,” in which the last chorus had lines ending with “chance,” “romance” and “passionate trance.” At a party given by Marion Davies in the Oceanhouse beach mansion William Randolph Hearst had built for her, after the aged and curiously shockable publisher had gone upstairs to bed (curious since he lived openly with his mistress), Pammy stepped to the microphone and uncorked an altered last stanza:
    You’re here to pitch,
    I’m here to catch;
    Where I itch
    You know how to scratch,
    So honey if you’ll give me a chance,
    I’ll take hold of that thing in your pants;
    I’ll stroke it and I’ll suck it,
    I’ll sit on it and I’ll fuck it
    Till I leave you in an unaccustomed trance.
    This pretty much brought down the Oceanhouse, and by noon on Monday the whole town was trying to quote Pammy’s words. Unfortunately for her, the song had been recorded by a young reporter for Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner who wanted to curry favor with the chief. Hearst, too furious even to reprimand his mistress, had the recording sent to his friend J. Edgar Hoover with a note: “This one has Red sympathies. Let’s cool her off.” The head of the FBI office in Los Angeles paid a visit to Mossy at Jubilee. “Don’t bother to get scratches on your record by playing it on my phonograph,” Mossy told the G-man, “because I was at the party myself.” But what he said to Pammy was, “They’re threatening to go to the Legion of Decency with it, Walter Winchell, the churches. Bad luck, but no more union garbage and Red meetings for you, young lady, or your career will be over. They’ll deport you as an alien, and they’ll try to take your daughter away. They’ll keep her here. They’re not kidding about deportation.”
    â€œWhaaaat? Take Millie? You’re joking.”
    â€œThey’ll claim anyone who sings songs like that is an unfit mother. Period.”
    For the next two years labor organizers complained they couldn’t get Palmyra Millevoix at their rallies anymore. The more sophisticated among them shrugged. “She’s sold out like the rest of ’em. Works for the fascist Zangwill. ’Nuff said.”
    Mossy’s party was entering its climactic phase when Pammy reached the piano, where the accompanist from the Jubilee orchestra offered a few chords to gain silence. “I came to the California of unlimited hopes,” Pammy began before the talking died completely. “Most of you have helped me and none of you have hurt me—much.” Appreciative titters. Nils Matheus Maynard clinked his glass with a spoon until the room was quiet. Mossy came down all the stairs but one, which he needed to stand on in order to see above heads to Pammy; sensitive about his height—five and a half feet—he also didn’t want to stay at the top of the stairs like the Pope on his balcony. Pammy smiled across the room at him. “My employer, our genial and easygoing host” (chuckles from the braver guests) “has asked me for a song. He is a skeptical optimist, while I remain a cheerful pessimist. The best we can do to keep the wolf away is have some fun and thank Amos Zangwill for the evening.” Scattered applause for Mossy. “Times change, don’t they?” Palmyra was keeping time now with her hips as the piano vamped a few notes. “In the Twenties we had plenty, In the Thirties it’s all gone, But in the Thirties we got dirty, And we dance from dark till dawn.