Girl of My Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page A

off his lobster boat by a wave he hadn’t seen coming?
    I was catapulted into an obsession by Joey’s suicide as effectively as if he’d hurled flaming branches at my walled castle, igniting every chair and curtain inside. Because Pammy asked me for a favor I surmised I had her favor. The hope that plants a seedling of itself in a young breast is as much curse as blessing since it drains every moment of contentment. Potential is always rearing its greedy portentous head. The joke was that she hadn’t even made use of the favor I did, speaking no words at the funeral.
    My castle was a shack, tucked on Sumac Lane in Santa Monica Canyon. A closet of a bedroom, bathroom with a stall shower, kitchen with a card table in it, and the tiny, dark living room with two wooden chairs, an empty crate for a coffee table, and a secondhand couch I kept doilies on to avoid having to look at the stuffing that leaked from either end. It wasn’t as though I had visitors. Yet when I looked out at the sycamores and eucalyptus climbing the hill to where associate producers and car dealers lived who could afford much more than my prewar forty dollars a month, I was happy.
    By prewar I mean pre-prewar because in 1934 only the most prescient—Winston Churchill and a smattering of hypersensitive Jews—thought we’d ever be fighting the Germans again. The booming Twenties of my teens had passed quickly, hollow though the boom was, while the Depression Thirties were dragging ponderously. But for me at twenty-four, there was already a job in pictures, this compact shelter, and Palmyra. Mine was a love all the more precious for being unknown to its object.
    Nor was it only Palmyra. It looked as though I was getting on in the world. I’d been praised for my idea about two sets of robbers coming to knock over the same bank unaware of each other; Gable and Cagney, as polar opposites, would be perfect for the two gang chiefs, or try Eddie Robinson if we couldn’t get Cagney. I’d been invited to Mossy’s big party, I’d had lunch with Trent Amberlyn and Fred MacMurray, everyone had seen Palmyra Millevoix—yes!—blow a grateful kiss to me as I left the commissary, and I’d been assigned A Doll’s House , which four other writers had failed to lick.
    At this time, early 1934, I was disguised as a blank page on which other people wrote orders, urgent entreaties, or merely a list of chores. A writer, yes I was that, but a derivative, complaisant sort who wanted only to oblige, not to express a self at least as hidden from me as from others. Watch what I do with my treatment for A Doll’s House , I said to my estranged self, never mind Ibsen: I didn’t need approval from the dead. I’ll give them a Nora tougher and more lovable than he had.
    The kiss from Palmyra, blown across two tables and observed by a squadron of my betters, was the result of my providing her a stanza she meant to use in a song she was writing for a picture she wasn’t in and hadn’t even been set to score. Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields had been writing the melodies and lyrics for a musical with a kid in it who was always being teased by taller boys. The producer felt that if the kid, played by Mickey Rooney, had a song of his own it could literally beef up his character. When McHugh and Fields, who Hollywood said ripped up the Depression and threw it away with “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” returned to New York for a show that meant more to them than this movie, it was natural for Palmyra Millevoix to be asked to fill in with a couple of numbers. We were kind of a family at Jubilee—larger and more loving than our original families in many cases, if also more contentious—and it was just as natural for Palmyra, who was busy starring in two other pictures, to reach down and ask a junior writer if he had any quick thoughts for a song Rooney might sing. The next morning I handed her