Girl of My Dreams by Peter Davis Page B

Nice to give him the drinking problem, automatically makes him more interesting and justifies the wife leaving home, even taking the kiddies to her mother’s while old Torvie promises to get off the sauce. She’s not really abandoning her home that way. Leaves us with morality in the saddle and the prospect of a reunited family. You think Fred MacMurray is ready for Torvie?” Maybe, but he’s not ready for Garbo, I didn’t dare say. Garbo was the star they wanted for Nora though I’d heard Pammy was hoping she’d get the part.
    Hackley’s praise made me proud, with no inkling of how much more Ibsen would hate me than the other writers who did nothing worse than change his ending while I had triumphantly destroyed everything he meant in the play. I looked around for Lidowitz. Not here. He somehow didn’t rate, yet I did. My moment of strut. Woozily, I took out my car keys and jingled them. Just to make some noise.
    Haloed beneath a chandelier, with the self-possession of a nested starling, Pammy greeted people alone. Her honey-gold hair was now in a twirled mound at the top of her head—she re-coiffed in the powder room?—while the green diaphanous gown was both French and ancient Greek. She was classical and romantic. Was it possible?—yes, she’d begun working her way toward me. She must have heard about my coup at the studio; surely Seaton Hackley wouldn’t have praised me without a nod from Mossy, a nod that had made the rounds. A disobedient strand of her upswept hair, straying from the rest of her coiffure, caught more light at the back of her neck. What would she say to me? Or I to her? Why could she come to me like this but I couldn’t approach her? Or could I? The way of the pecking order: a junior screenwriter speaks when spoken to, ready with a bon mot. I wasn’t.
    I’d say, “You’re looking even more ravishing than usual.” Naw, that’s what a flit would tell her. Likewise I couldn’t say how much I loved her in The Many Lives of Theodosia , a negligible effort by all concerned. Palmyra was getting nearer, greeting friends but drawing unrelentingly closer to me. How about just going with “Mossy really knows how to live, ha ha, you should see the main house.” Death. I was terminally abashed. Here she is. In two seconds I’ll have to say something. No, oh.
    In the last tenth of an instant, like a car swerving to avoid a crash, Palmyra angled—she had almost bumped into me—to kiss and embrace Simone Swan Bluett, who did her costumes on Autumn Nocturne . “Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight,” said Simone to Palmyra. Had Pammy been heading for her the whole time, then, or had she changed her mind as she approached me, deciding late in her sashay that her dresser was worth her time and affection while I was not?
    â€œI told you, it’s just dues,” said the reappeared Sylvia Solomon, patting my shoulder. Maternally, sisterly? I turned to her and said, “It’s discouraging and I’m embarrassed that you noticed.” “Look,” she said, “be thankful you don’t have to sleep with anyone to get around this town. It wasn’t so easy for me. Though come to think of it, it wouldn’t hurt if you found your way into the right bed here and there.”
    How do you get into the right bed anyway, I did not ask as we were joined by Yancey Ballard and other writers. The angular Yeatsman stooped to my eye level. “Feeling isolated? It’s good for the soul. I myself look forward to becoming a sixty-year-old smiling public man some distant day.” We screenwriters huddled, indeed grumbled, in a corner filled with a reproduction of Rodin’s Thinker and another of a Greek god entwined around a goddess. Some of these writers were Hollywood notables making three thousand or more a week, some were notorious, some disappointed, some permanently