The Vermelle Tapes, Excerpt 1

Gwen Vermelle was the longest-serving typist for the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie studio, serving from 1924 to 1962. In 1980, she sat down in her Los Angeles home for an interview with a journalism student that was recorded but never published, until it was found in a Houston storage locker in 2016.

Excerpt 1:

Nixon used to come by this building, you know. Not to see a girl or anything like that, that would be too normal. Three doors down, there was a psychic… more like a voodoo priestess or some other concoction — in truth she was a dancer from Idaho but she wasn’t very good, or very available, if you know what I mean… so to make money she would wrap some shawls and drapes and crucifixes all over herself and claim to be a voodoo doctor and read palms and all that, and apparently Nixon was really into that stuff… there’s nothing more superstitious than a politician, they’ll avoid a town if it has three sixes in the zip code, even if it’s loaded with votes…

… anyway, Nixon’s people found out about her and he insisted on seeing her — she told me all this in the ’70’s after Watergate, I know all about that, the real story — and he was so excited, he called her Madame and her cat hissed at him the whole time then pissed all over the wall. Animals can tell what someone’s like, you know. He wanted to see if she could help him in the debates, he said that half the country had a hard-on for Kennedy and he was in trouble. So she was a quick thinker, Elaine, that was her name: she went into her bedroom and sprayed some cheap talc inside a scarf and told him to sprinkle it on Kennedy’s microphones before the first debate and he’d get tongue-tied. So they did, but the Kennedy people were even worse than the Nixon people thanks to Joe’s money — I met Joe several times, by the way, he used to come into the studio and tell LB how to do this and do that, plant “messages” in the scripts that were actually intended for his pals in Russia… you know that scene in “Scarlet Saint” where Frank Morgan knocks over a plant? That was a code to burn down Russian farms because they were growing too many potatoes and it was hurting Joe’s vodka sales. Joe liked really big girls, there was a typist whose ass spread completely over both sides of her seat and Joe was nuts for her, he had her send him her underwear for money. Unwashed. I asked her, Louise, can I get in on this? I’ll go over to Bentano’s right now and buy a box of their frilliest stuff and, you know, “personalize” it, but she said no, he’ll know. He had a nose like a beagle from all the bootlegging. She bought a house with all that underwear she sent him. Then she met a sailor and lost a ton of weight and Joe moved onto someone else. I was always dancer-thin, as you can see, he wouldn’t even have looked at me. I did alright, though.

Where was I? Right, the microphone. Well, Kennedy’s people got wind of it right before the debate so they sent a kid out to find some garbage, some disgusting old food from the alley, then they paid a technician to smear it all over Nixon’s podium. Which is why he looked the way he did on TV. They said it was the flu but it was the smell. And you know what happened next. The papers said he looked embalmed. But he always looked like that, like he’d never drank a glass of water in his life.

So what was it you wanted to talk about? The “golden” age? Gold for some, syphilis for the rest of us. Not me, mind you. I knew how to handle myself. Even with Burt Lancaster. He’d screw an overcoat if it was wet. We called him Spurt Landfarther. One year they had to send half the girls in the typist pool for shots after Burt was done with them. They made his manager pay for it, too. I saw the letter. You see, when you’re in the pool, you learn everything, because you don’t just type scripts, you type everything, because LB, he wanted a record of everything. You know why, don’t you? So he could extort everyone about everything. Half his Oscars were won by directors with godawful secrets. The things we typed. Gene Kelly had a girl type up every bowel movement he ever made. He’d record them, then she’d type them up once a month. Length, weight, color. The studio doctor told him to do it, then Gene got them all doing it. Ricardo Montalban? He go once a week, he couldn’t stand it. Marie Dressler’s were gigantic, they had to change all the plumbing in her mansion, then she started going outside when she clogged that, too. She drank milk straight from a cow twice a day, which she kept in a spare room. And of course, when the news got out, which it always did because they never paid the girls enough to live on, the studio was able to kill the story because they had something worse on the magazine people. Or they’d make it up. MGM had the best makeup people, so they’d make up someone to look like a certain threatening publisher, you couldn’t tell them apart, then shoot him naked with a donkey. They made the FBI look like amateurs. My God, what a magical time!