The Vermelle Tapes: Excerpt 2

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.

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The stuff they did to people? The studios? You want to know about that? Well, you probably know the famous stories that everyone knows: they raised Judy Garland’s hairline, they bought Rock Hudson a wife… They also bought him a third testicle. Rock was a bigger diva than Joan Crawford. He always needed to be the biggest, the starriest. Tab Hunter gets a Lincoln? I want a Rolls! James Dean has two perfectly round two-inch testicles? I want three! They brought a doctor up from Mexico to do it, the same one who tried to put that huge horse cock on Gene Autry…

… what, you didn’t know about that?

Gene’s prize screenwriter was Betty Burbridge — she must have written fifty westerns. She had guts that girl, she travelled from New York to California by herself with a trunk full of western novels, and by the time she got there four days later she had ten ideas and they bought one for fifty dollars right on the spot. Here we are typing like a house on fire for thirty bucks a week and this girl sells two pages for fifty bucks. And she kept her panties on, too.

Well, Gene got a whiff of this girl writer and hired her for himself, and she was gold. Five, ten hits in a row. She was smart. She was the one who suggested that Cagney shove a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s face in Public Enemy: it was originally written with a banana and when they filmed it it took forever. Grab the banana, peel it, shove it… But she wanted more than a job from Gene, and she was insatiable. We’re talking Marlene Dietrich insatiable. Deeplick — that’s what Dottie called Dietrich — Dottie was a fellow typist who made up all the best names for everyone, until one day Hairy Pooper — Gary Cooper — found out and had her fired. He had an Arab barber come in and shave his ass every week, they’re very good with the blades and the balms. It was like a chihuahua down there. And Dottie took it hard, she ended up getting plastered and breaking into Theda Bara’s poolhouse and drowning in a huge vat of lard Theda kept there. There’s no second acts in this town for a girl, you know, it’s all highest highs and lowest lows, no middle. One day you’re the bright new thing getting your toes sucked on the deck of a yacht by Eleanor Roosevelt, the next day you’re dead in a tub of lard. Theda would soak in it, it’s a very effective moisturizer, apparently. I’m a Ponds girl.

Anyway, Deeplick would go through eight, nine girls a month. She must have done every librarian in California. One weekend a college girls’ volleyball tournament came to town and they had to delay production for the whole week after, she couldn’t talk, her tongue wouldn’t move. We told the press her pet monkey died. I wrote the press release. “Lying in his favorite tuxedo, a flawless replica of the one Miss Dietrich wore to shock the world in Morocco, including the cigarettes that the spoiled simian and the sublime star loved to smoke together, Rudy received one last kiss from a shattered Miss Dietrich before the tiny maple casket was closed forever.” I originally had a marble casket but Louis changed it to maple, he didn’t want the public, who were on food stamps, to think she was extravagant. Not that a monkey in a two thousand dollar tuxedo isn’t extravagant, of course. She didn’t even have a monkey, it was my idea. I wasn’t just a typist.

So with Betty, it was four, five days in a row in her bungalow with Gene until he would finally tear her off him and crawl straight for the blood bank. But the scripts were that good, she was a cash machine. And she’d say to him, you know Gene, you’re wonderful… for an average man. Insinuating that, you know, he fell a little short. Well that made him crazy, he needed her to stay happy and keep plugging away, so one day he was shooting and they brought his horse to him and the horse had a huge green stiff, some of the makeup boys had been screwing around with it, God knows what else they did to it, the poor thing… and Gene took one look at it, made a few calls, and the next thing you know that doctor from Mexico is on Gene’s private plane to Hollywood. They used the operating room at Universal, the one they built for The Raven, the movie with Karloff and Lugosi — all the studios would rent out and share things between themselves. You might recall they had a torture chamber in that picture, too, but I won’t say who used that. Mickey Rooney. Oops. Look, you can’t smile like that for twenty hours a day without a spring coming loose. You know what? I’m going to stop here. He’s still got a lot of power, you know. They said his fifth wife and her boyfriend killed themselves, but…

Okay, back to Gene. His people found this doctor and they brought him up and he was all set to go, they were all in the operating room set, a whole circus. Including Gene’s buddy from the Freemasons. Gene was a Freemason and he was dead serious about it, and they had this thing where if something happened in an operation, only another Freemason could give you blood, so the other guy was there just in case. He had the whole outfit: the apron thing over the pants, the medals, the big long staff. And a goat. He brought in a goat. Like I said, a circus. So they were all ready, they were going to do it… but something happened. The doctor went and took the thing out that they were going to put on Gene — you know, the horse cock — but it was all wrong. They’d cut it off wrong. It was just the tip, the knob, they barely had the rest of it, the nice big long part. So there was all this confusion, the doctor didn’t speak any English, and Gene got up and grabbed it and looked at it — apparently it was five inches wide — and he said what the hell is this? You’re going to turn Gene Autry into a toadstool? And he threw it at the doctor and stormed out, and the thing landed on the floor, and, well, the goat ate it. They eat everything. Anyway, Gene ended up using those weights down there, that’s what they all used. George Kukor knew a German guy who made them and he’d have all these boys over on Sundays, standing in the sun, smoking and chatting away while their things were being stretched. And George would walk back and forth in front of them like a mother hen, spraying their cocks down with aloe vera so they wouldn’t get stretch marks. George was worse than Betty. Dottie called him Gorge Cocker. I miss her.