Female Fellow at the American Film Institute Doheny Mansion, Beverly Hills, 1971
By Penny Perry
She pulled up in her dented VW, twenty
miles from her cockroach-filled kitchen.
Five feet tall, wearing a three-dollar dress
from Lerner’s. The dress long and black,
looked expensive. N.O.W. had picketed
the all male institute the year before.
Marble floors. Carved wood staircases.
Louis the 14th chairs. The study where
one Doheny murdered another.
The dining room with the gold chandelier
that tinkled and rose when Hitchcock
or Truffaut screened their latest film.
Most of the male fellows looked well-fed
and had smooth white hands. Over wine
and brie in the Great Hall that first night
the men surveyed the female fellows.
Will announced she had nice-sized breasts
for such a small girl. Gilbert whispered
the women here were dogs, present
company excepted. A compliment from Ivan:
Her dialog was sharp. She wrote like a man.
Sam said because she was a writer she wasn’t
a real woman. At dinner, she and a directing
fellow, Susan, sat across the table from
Gregory Peck. Head twirling: The Louis
14th chairs. The chandelier. Dizzy with
wine, she and Susan fantasized bowling
Sam’s head down a long marble hall. Work
days, bent over her dime-store notebook,
her pen unzipped the page. She wrote under
a gnarled sycamore. Her boys, two and three,
splashed in a stone fountain. One day, chicken
pox, red as poppies, bloomed on her sons.
Male fellows came down with the pox.
Sam had sores on his thumb and on his tongue,
a wound that would scab, but not heal.
Penny Perry is a six-time Pushcart Prize nominee in poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared in California Quarterly, Lilith, Redbook, Earth’s Daughter, the Paterson Literary Review and the San Diego Poetry Annual. Her first collection of poems, Santa Monica Disposal & Salvage (Garden Oak Press, 2012) earned praise from Marge Piercy, Steve Kowit, Diane Wakoski and Maria Mazziotti Gillan. She writes under two names, Penny Perry and Kate Harding.
Photo credit: Doheny Mansion living room courtesy of University of California.