Free Girl of My Dreams by Peter Davis Page B

Enter Marlene grandly. “Between her usual brace of flits,” said Tutor Beedleman. Dietrich’s wide-eyed smile enfolded the room and no one in it. High-waisted black slacks making her legs even longer, an ivory blouse forming a V so expansive its first button was below her self-assured breasts. Boyish, womanly, naughty and haughty, freed from the rigid grip of gender. Why she lighted on me I don’t know; I must have resembled the cringing courtier I was. The low voice, the open throat: “Can you take me, Darlink, to Mr. Zangvill.”
    Leaving all the men and half the women with their tongues hanging—though I heard one actress say to another, “I’ll bet that dame poses in her sleep”—I escorted Miss D back up the stairs to the library. She took my arm. No ceremony with her host once I’d opened the library door. “Mossy, ve must talk, ve must weally sit down mit each udder.” I shuffled out of the library along with Baringer Donovan, the Warner’s producer. “Ten more minutes,” Donovan said to me as we rejoined the rest of the party, “shit, five more minutes, and I’ve had a deal with Jubilee so I could tell Jack Warner on Monday to go hump one of Zanuck’s polo ponies.” “Tough luck,” I said. “Nothing to do with luck,” he said, “it was that hun bitch’s timing. Say, who are you anyway?”
    Down I went another fathom. What hopes I’d had when I’d come! How they were dashed! Pondering my exclusion from the kingdom of notability, I tried to convince myself it was temporary. I thought about the fame of a hero like Charles Lindbergh who had earned it (then paid for it so dearly with his infant son’s kidnapping and death) and the residual fame of the has-beens like Anita Billow who simply moved about in her cocoon of repute. Billow, who was here at the party, had been a silent star whose Polish accent (née Bilowitsky) kept her not only from achieving talkie stardom but even from getting small parts. She was a somebody relegated to nobody status by technology. Unable to make the necessary adjustments to her thickly accented English, unlike the sultry Dietrich or the whispery Garbo, she sounded like a truck driver with a sore throat. For Anita Billow, fame was lifelong access. She simply went around looking ravishing, nursing her legend, saying she didn’t miss acting. For the public, each kind of fame dissolved into each other kind, soothing them with voyeurism and wish fulfillment. In Hollywood, fame became a kind of magnetic north, and those whose fame lasted would merely be the famous who embodied the public’s more transcendent hopes. The stars’ glamour surfaced as the mysterious flash of lightning extended indefinitely.
    The directors did their late-night hammering. “Actors are basically crazy, can’t let the inmates run the asylum.” “Piece of practical advice, never fuck a starlet if you can fuck a star.” “Thirty-foot-high image of passion—audiences think this is reality and the world outside the theater is an illusion. Know what, they’re right.” “Escape, escape, escape. Eggheads knock it, I live for it.” “Naw, gimme a tough guy fighting in an alley, a broad upstairs in a rooming house, they meet in a breadline and I’m cooking with gas.”
    I looked out the window and pictured Father Junipero Serra creating a mission on this site in the 1700s, on the ground above Beverly Hills. He would have put a holy place here. The Indians converted, farmed, carved their crosses, built a few huts around a chapel, sickened with European diseases, prayed. Father Serra made their faith his cause. The bones of the Indians and their Spanish confessors and conquistadors might be buried beneath the Zangwill palace and gardens. This vortex where I was sinking had once been a mission. A mission it was again.
    â€œWhat a