Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 2: Carole Lombard's Plane Read online

  “A perfect mirror of the ‘American century.’”

  —“Editors’ Choice,” The New York Times Book Review

  A Washington Post “Notable Fiction” selection for 2011

  Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter

  In Cadwaller’s Gun—Book 1 of Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter—cranky eighty-six-old blogger Pam Buchanan told readers of her plan to blow her brains out in protest while she’s got President George W. Bush on the phone on her birthday: June 6, 2006. While waiting for the White House to call, she breathlessly described her early years: her flight to Europe with her fabled mother after “the Scandal” and her father’s misfortunate death on the polo field one day in 1925, then her return to the Depression-era American Midwest in adolescence once her mother’s suicide in Brussels left her in the care of her guardian, Chicago advertising man and future monk Nicholas Carraway. By age twenty-one, she was married to—and soon divorced from—Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Brannigan Murphy (Prometheus in Madrid), meanwhile launching the precocious writing career that took her from reporting on the “dawn-fingered Rosies” of World War Two’s home front for Regent’s magazine to preparing to go back to Europe, this time as a war correspondent.

  As Carole Lombard’s Plane opens, we find Pam exulting on daisysdaughter.com in the “voluptuous allure” of 1948 Hollywood as a studio gets ready to film her best-selling WW2 memoir, Nothing Like a Dame. But in 2006, it’s still only early afternoon—and Cadwaller’s gun is still in her lap as she waits for the White House’s call to reprieve her from putting up with any more of this Shinola.

  “You’re unlikely to find a wittier, more ingenious, more compulsively readable novel this year than Tom Carson’s latest … If The Great Gatsby didn’t quite reach the green of the Great American Novel—it’s too short for such a big country—Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter lands within putting distance of the grand old flagpole.”

  —Steven Moore, The Washington Post

  “Trippy, hilarious, brilliant.”

  —Susan Coll, author of Beach Week, Acceptance, and Rockville Pike

  “The most distinctive voice to be found in any recent American novel … Maybe building a cockamamie epic out of a maddening jumble of cultural and historical ephemera is the only way to really do justice to the American century in all its chaos and contradictions. Even if it isn’t, F. Scott Fitzgerald still owes Carson a drink for trying.”

  —Jason Anderson, Toronto Globe and Mail

  “Playful, imaginative, and extremely funny … Great dames of the 20th century, open your ranks: Pam Buchanan is part of the sisterhood.”

  —Farran Smith Nehme, the Self-Styled Siren

  “As brilliant as fireworks exploding over the Washington Monument, Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter is that rarest of triumphs—a laugh-out-loud funny novel that’s also dead serious … Here is history seen through the looking glass—delirious, diabolically witty, and absolutely unique.”

  —John Powers, Critic at Large for NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross and author of Sore Winners: American Idols, Patriotic Shoppers, and Other Strange Species in George Bush’s America

  “An uproarious, antic, tender and proudly huge novel … Earns its status as an American epic even while it redefines what a literary epic is.”

  —Mark Athitakis, Washington City Paper

  “Huzzah!”

  —Susann Cokal, author of Mirabilis and Breath and Bones

  “Inventive and masterful.”

  —Thaisa Frank, author of Heidegger’s Glasses and A Brief History of Camouflage

  “Sprawling, clever, flamboyant, recklessly ambitious, Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter takes gigantic risks and delivers gigantic rewards.”

  —Geoff Nicholson, author of Bleeding London and Gravity’s Volkswagen

  “Carson—the film critic for GQ and the author of the novel Gilligan’s Wake—gives himself wholeheartedly to scouring Pam’s lifetime for iconic moments and succeeds: Pam edged out for the Pulitzer by Jack Kennedy, Pam with [Lyndon Baines] Johnson’s head in her lap before his speech forestalling nomination, Pam in a Hollywood both seedy and glamorous, Pam at D-Day … For our purposes, Pam is America, and once, for better or worse, America was everywhere.”

  —Tadzio Koelb, The New York Times Book Review

  Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter

  Book 2: Carole Lombard’s Plane

  Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter

  Book 2: Carole Lombard’s Plane

  Tom Carson

  River House INK

  New Orleans, LA

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2011 Tom Carson

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, online, radio, or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher (Csaba Lukacs, River House INK).

  Cover painting by Glenn Arthur

  Author photo by Victoria F. Gaitán

  Design and copyediting by Nita Congress

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9825973-4-7

  Published in the USA

  Original one-volume edition published by Paycock Press, Arlington, VA

  River House INK

  625 Marigny Street

  New Orleans, LA 70117

  Visit daisysdaughter.com.

  In memory of Alice, with love to her friends.

  My deepest thanks to Richard Peabody—a man I’m proud to call “Big X”—and to designer/editor extraordinaire Nita Congress. A special thanks to Glenn Arthur for letting us use Le Navigateur and Le Commandant de Bord.

  For help of various kinds, I’m also grateful to Virginia Carson Young, Ron Perkowski, Saïdeh Pakravan, Arthur Shaffer and David Rowland, Ron Anteroinen, and Alberto and Victoria F. Gaitán. My thanks as well to Csaba Lukacs, David Lummis, and River House for undertaking this new two-volume edition of Daisy Buchanan's Daughter.

  “One thing that flatters me and Bill a lot is that Diana, who is normally shy with children, seems genuinely devoted to ours so we don’t feel that it is a strain for her when we take them to Chantilly. Anne hangs on her words and follows her in from the garden helping to carry the great heaps of flowers, and stands adoringly passing them up as Diana creates one of her magical arrangements. ‘Four delphiniums now, Anne, mix the pale blues with the darker. Thank you. Now a big bunch of roses. That’s it. Always remember when doing a mixed bouquet to have clumps of the same flower together. Not one here, one there, that makes for an arty bouquet. Arty things are common, don’t you agree?’ ‘Yes, Lady Diana…Is it a party, Lady Diana?’ ‘No, it isn’t, and that is why we must take a lot of trouble…Suppose we put the white china unicorn on the middle of the table and make a wreath of white flowers for him to wear around his neck. Shall we go to pick the wild flowers?’”

  —Susan Mary Alsop, To Marietta from Paris, 1945–1960

  There was an old man of Khartoum

  Who kept two black sheep in his room.

  To remind him, he said,

  Of two friends who were dead.

  But he never would specify whom.

  —quoted by Gene Smith in When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson

 
Part One

  1. The Voluptuous Allure of Hollywood

  Posted by: Daisy Clover’s Daughter

  Pam’s a map in the mirror now, especially when I risk beaming at myself. The griffins have come home to Proust, Hopsie! My dentition’s foxhole of gold-cusped good humor turns my hoisted mug into a misinformed jack-o-lantern primping for Christmas. Yet to the mimsy borogoves, a gaze at my grinning reflection feels more like looking at the former Yugoslavia. We kept it hung together while we could.

  Not that any raving beauty has been lost. The only photograph of me in Vogue was a black-and-white one of Mrs. Gerson in her Beverly Hills garden when Glory Be came out, and the flowers had to do most of the work. Still, I doubt I ever looked better than I did when twenty-seven-year-old Pamela Buchanan, bestselling author of Nothing Like a Dame (“A delight!”—Celia Brady, Phoenix Sun), came down the ramp from a silvery, still propeller-shimmery C-47 Dakota and let her gladdened skin get tipsy on the lavish blue champagne of a Los Angeles nonwinter one day in early 1948.

  Catch the mistake, Tim? I still kept making it two and a half years after VJ-Day. DC-3 Constellation, not Dakota. The planes weren’t in olive drab anymore, neither was I, and nobody would ever call me Pamita again if I saw them coming. Wrong continent, his own book had omitted me outright, and what a prick Eddie Whitling had been, really. Everywhere but Dachau.

  The studio car was waiting on the tarmac, a more minor perk in the way-back-when in case Potus bridles at my lèse-majesté. Wouldn’t you know those eyebrows of his anywhere, even Larousse? The proof was that three other cars stood there too, admitting men in cayenne, cardamom, and ginger sportcoasts—sorry, sports coats—who only looked at me with interest once I helped myself to my own Lincoln’s back seat.

  Sorry, gents! You could’ve been currying favor with me since the Rockies. And right you are, Bacall I’m not. I’m told she could end up playing me, though. Ta.

  She didn’t: Lauren Bacall, I mean. Neither did Maureen O’Hara, Dorothy Malone, Donna Reed, Barbara bel Geddes, Jane Russell (you wish!!, as Panama would say), or Daisy Clover, all of whose names got bruited at some point. Past forty by then and matronized by her Penelope to Fredric March’s three-striper Ulysses in The Best Years of Our Lives, Myrna Loy was on nobody’s list except Pam’s schoolgirl one, unconfessed even—or especially?—to Gerson.

  I did meet her once, though, and I hope you’ll agree a tongue-tied Pam has novelty. I practically demonstrated the sailors’ manual through my lipstick as the Nora Charles of my reverie-prone Purcey’s youth graciously waited for me to either give her her hand back or at least name a price. There was bougainvillea behind her, and a ridiculously pleased-looking tea set laid in front of her. People favoring Truman’s reelection lounged and lunged around, and one measure of the laughingly bovine wedge of inanity I became is that I remember feeling impressed by the pensée that Anzio was a long way off. (Well, yes, Pam: some 6,370 miles as the cow leaps. Montaigne slept undisturbed.)

  I’d love to say every last word she spoke is engraved on my heart, but the coroner will need a working knowledge of cuneiform. I did reassure her Harry had my vote, of course—my unpremeditated goodbye to leftist capriciousness, represented by Henry Wallace on the 1948 ballot. In memory yet green, Myrna Loy’s eyes were the mint that made a good Democrat out of me.

  Posted by: Pam

  Early on in what I had no idea would be my eight years in Hollywood, the random materializations of its familiar b&w gods in carelessly Californian color did make one feel like Alice among the playing cards. Miss Loy’s blossoming on the old Pygmalion’s veranda was one of only a few such encounters—my crimsoned introduction to unwittingly Tijuana-biblical Gabby Chatterton being another, the majestic third coming soon to a website near you—to turn me gawky in near Hormelic earnest.

  After all, I’d interviewed generals, slinking my byline through SHAEF rub-a-dubs where Metro’s old boast “More stars than there are in heaven” meant something more soldierly, not to say shoulderly: my Pam-pun to sloshed Eddie and a couple of periwinkling stenographers from Ike’s press gang in a pub two weeks before Normandy. A hint to our intake and jitters was that they found it hilarious.

  In fact, during the spitball stages of Nothing Like a Dame’s Metro-morphosis into The Gal I Left Behind Me, Gerson had the notion of getting Omar Bradley to appear as himself. His cameo would’ve reprised the pate-massaging press conference during the Bulge when Pam Buchanan of Regent’s, not yet renamed “Peg Kimball” and still uncast to boot (Barbara bel Geddes did Caught instead), had asked whether he could confirm that a whole regiment of the 106th was gone—just gone!, and Tim Cadwaller’s future favorite author, Kurt Vonnegut, gone with it into a German POW camp—and there was interest. The Pentagon, as we were learning to call it, saw such quasi-commercials as useful in cementing everyone’s dazed understanding that its wartime encroachments were now a fixture of our national life.

  The new Army Chief of Staff’s schedule proved too crowded, and too bad. When I think of the reliable uncles, worried lawyers, and thoughtful apothecaries Brad might’ve gone on to play for Metro—and had played, only opposite the Wehrmacht and under Eisenhower—I know I’m just wishing more of you had gotten to appreciate the helpless respect the flamboyant owe those able to assert authority without theatrics.

  No surprise Mark Clark, the long-nosed dolt of Anzio, offered his services in Brad’s place. One red-leatherette afternoon at Chasen’s, Bill M. nearly choked with laughter as I described the eager telegrams from Clark’s PRO, and Bill had always liked him better than I had. Protecting the two disrespectful combat men in Bill’s Stars and Stripes cartoons from the brass hats who wanted them to reform, or at least to shave and wear less raggedy uniforms, was the best thing Clark did in the war. Anyhow, Fifth Army’s former commander didn’t end up in The Gal either.

  If only that were true of Bill, since our friendship didn’t survive Metro’s fictionalization of him as smirky, doodling “Chet Dooley.” Everybody knew a cartoonist for “The GI News,” how inspired, could only be one person, and as late as the Bicentennial I’d sometimes get muttonholed by an Insomnia Channel watcher eager to know whether our romance was what had busted up Bill’s first marriage. When I explained it had been fabricated, they looked knowing as only ignoramuses can.

  Knowing darned well he’d never laid a glove on me, Bill was genuinely upset. “That first night at the villa, I showed you a snapshot of my wife and kid,” the last letter I ever had from him went. “Mind telling me how that got turned into Chet Casanova and his etchings?” I’d be flattering the Buchanan bod if I thought what truly got his goat was that the plot had Chet—that damned Hal Lime!—lose me to Walt Wanks as Eddie “Harting,” Eddie Whitling’s nom de Metro in the final scenario.

  The Gal I Left Behind Me’s release into unimpressed reviewers’ captivity lay far ahead when we had our Chasen’s tête-à-tête. Or tête-à-tit, as very nearly happened when Bill stood up to find a phone as Deanna Durbin squirmed and brimmed by. I’m not even sure why he was in California, since Hollywood’s massacre of his own book was only a gleam in Variety’s eye at the time. It could be he’d just come to Chasen’s to see if the chili was everything Louella said it was and then stayed on with me for the sauce. Or our waitress, taloned to be the next Linda Darnell and resentfully aware, those purloined loins receding like an unanswerable—not by my eyes, anyhow!—knock-knock joke, that we’d be no help.

  I’d seen him in civvies before, since we shared a publisher and he’d done Nothing’s dust-jacket drawing of his pal Pam a year earlier. Yet that afternoon in Chasen’s was the closest we came to recovering our old esprit de beachhead, as the sense of a mighty, unreasoning engine clanking away all around us was uncannily similar. Darting like his brain’s inky infantry, Bill’s eyes hadn’t quite lost the impishness that had welcomed mine as new playmates in the correspondents’ villa at Nettuno.

&nb
sp; When I first blinked at his baby face, I’d been still itchily jeweled by sea salt under my newly issued correspondent’s togs. He’d been perched Aladdin-style in a knit GI cap atop an ammunition crate in some prewar Fascist’s vacation home that now boasted two splendid views of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Through the more recent of them, our Navy’s maneuvers were already halfway to Hollywood: Busby Berkeley with an ocean to play with, chorus-line landing craft enchanting a somnolent tender as durable as Esther Williams. And all that was already four years ago, a fact that, like our plush postwar America in general, seemed preposterous but encouraging.

  “Who was it named us the Bobbsey twins?” he asked out of the blue—red leatherette, brown Scotch, and violently violet Linda Darnelly nail polish, rather—once I’d got done spiting Mark Clark’s face. “Capa?”

  “Bob? No, never. Floyd Young. He only came up from Naples for the day.”

  “I wonder why he took a dislike to us?”

  “He only came up from Na-poli for the day,” arch Pam repeated. “I heard he had to borrow a change of pants when Anzio Annie hit paydirt, too.”

  “Yep, that must’ve been it.”

  “Of course it was! He was jealous.”

  Even so, I’m proud to say Bill thought too well of our friendship to let us sink into nostalgia’s bog head-on. As we’d both learned, that was what you ended up doing with people when the war was all you had in common. Or ever expected to, and my shoulders still recoiled at Eddie Whitling’s already resoftened mitts squeezing them at Nothing’s publication party last spring.

  Because I loved him, please note Bill’s thoughtful way of steering me back to now. “So who’s going to play him in your movie, huh? Way I remember, William Demarest would be about right.”