Black Swans, page 6
I was supposed to stay with an aunt in Silverlake, but I knew I could never stand being so far from the HOLLYWOOD sign, and, fortunately, an older woman friend was having an affair with a crazy Russian, so she loaned me her little apartment just two blocks from Hollywood and Vine. I lived there for several months, had a mad fling of my own with a married man who kept me stocked in Rainier ale and chocolate cake (my idea of lunch), until a little bungalow became available in a rental Hollywood court my parents owned, and I moved there. Hollywood courts are a style of architecture peculiar to Southern California, little bungalows facing each other with a walkway down the middle—God’s most perfect housing, in other words, before condos were thrust upon us.
In those days, women had no other ambition than to marry well enough to settle down, have children, and live happily ever after, except Hollywood women, who were notorious for having other ideas, most revolving around acting. I couldn’t act and wanted to be an artist or a writer like Françoise Sagan. And it seemed to me that all anyone had to do to become Françoise Sagan was to have a miserable love life and be kicked around and bored all the time.
I figured I’d have to be an artist because, unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to be bored, since I was always much too elated to imagine despair, no matter how doubtful my love life seemed to others. Married men were considered bad news in those days, and girls who loved them were looked upon as tragic and likely to commit suicide. But rather than kick me around, my married lover gave me tons of money, pastrami sandwiches, Rainier ale, and advice.
I tried to be depressed about living in a honeysuckle-covered bungalow at the foot of the HOLLYWOOD sign, with tons of arty friends and lovers for glamour and excitement. But I kept forgetting that I was supposed to be miserable, kicked around, and bored. As long as I could go bodysurfing in Santa Monica and get tan enough to attract adorable men, I was too distracted to be world-weary and spiritually bereft.
When people would first arrive from New York, they’d say stuff like “This place is full of fruits and nuts and you have no seasons.” So I knew they saw through the cheap thrills of shallow sunshine and were principled easterners determined to be unimpressed. But after a few weeks, even they would show up at Barney’s Beanery driving a brown Porsche, and they’d move into one of those Snow White wishing-well houses where all they could hear were birdies in the trees and all they could see were hollyhocks, roses, and lemon blossoms. And then they’d undergo a kind of molecular transformation, losing all their winter fat, their bad teeth, and their attitude that life was about artists being screwed by “the establishment.” And if they were fast enough on their feet, they’d soon become the establishment themselves. Or, at the very least, they’d wind up writing screenplays about Marxist good guys disguised as cat burglars.
After a while, I realized that New Yorkers were suckers for mere sunshine, while I, having grown up in Hollywood, knew the climate was just tricking people into feeling good. But I couldn’t help feeling good myself. And although I tried hard to write an abysmal Françoise Sagan novel, all I could write was a jolly book called Travel Broadens, which was about my trip to Europe. It was sort of a Daisy Miller version of innocence meets corruption, but instead of taking Henry James’s view that Europe was corrupt and America the innocent victim, I knew from firsthand experience that things were the other way around. It was enough to make anyone decide maybe being a depressed writer wasn’t as easy as it looked and perhaps I should become an artist after all.
When I was in Europe the summer Marilyn died, I realized that telling people I was an American didn’t impress them in the least. Whereas in a glamorous café on the quay in Cannes, when I told a man I was from Hollywood, he burst out with, “But why would you come here? Why leave?” And then he bloomed into an attitude of rapt attention and urgently asked, “What is it like?”
The momentum for all this began the day the first publicist took Theodosia Goodman from a suburb of Cincinnati and announced to the world that she was Theda Bara, the daughter of an “Eastern potentate.” It was too much even for the world sophisticates smoking Gauloises and drinking black espresso, too much for people who’d seen for themselves the realities of war and human injustice. If you could believe Hitler could exist, you could believe Hollywood.
By the time I got to that café in Cannes, the reasons that American girls used to go to Europe (to seek refinement, art, and deeper meaning to their lives) had changed. I mean, the Louvre is great, but how ya gonna keep them in Gay Paree after they’ve seen Gunfight at the O.K. Corral? Let alone Gone With the Wind.
Hollywood, that little neighborhood where I grew up, learned to swim and vowed never to grow old, enchanted itself with a dream that changed the world entirely. That it is totally trashed and run-down today, that there aren’t enough police to keep the winos and junkies and teenage flesh trade off Hollywood Boulevard, are irrelevant. They are far from what matters.
Because self-enchantment has nothing to do with upkeep or tradition or loyalty or museums. That Hollywood is tawdry, that people who expect others to worship them are unsubtle and low class, that publicity seekers deserve to be ridiculed—these are not new ideas. They have always been Hollywood’s loose ends, even in the dream 1920s, when the place itself was still paradise. Perhaps Hollywood’s one hundredth anniversary should be a celebration of the art of publicity. But public relations has always been regarded as the world’s most revolting profession, causing many publicists to try and keep a low profile, so nobody’s going to think that’s a good idea. Publicists, after all, aren’t here to make themselves enchanted, and if they are seen by most people as lily-livered coyotes, that’s their Karmic predicament.
We live in a world where whoever sedates us with the most glamour and captures our imaginations with the greatest intensity becomes history. And if Julio Iglesias knows that paying a publicist millions of dollars is what it takes to span the bridge between being an unknown millionaire Latin hero and being Willie Nelson’s pal on TV, then the self-enchanted, at least, know whose anniversary this is.
Hollywood is a fiction that happened, a tornado of fabrication, a comedy of publicity. It’s as tenuous today as it’s always been, but it’s still standing. Whatever it is, it’s not over. Not yet.
Expensive Regrets
In the early seventies, I had almost a year frequenting the Château Marmont as the girlfriend of someone who lived there, Walter. In fact breaking up with him, my worst regret was that I’d broken with the Château Marmont too. But once I began recommending it to my friends, it was hard to get them to consider anyplace else after they realized it was the only place in L.A. where, well, anything could happen, whereas every place else was just the Sherry Netherlands or trying to be. At least the Château Marmont kept looking as if when you entered a room you might be in Tangiers when you left. But then, my friends are the type who love Tangiers, and I’ve always been afraid if I went to the actual place, I’d never come back.
Anyway, when this new man I’d been flirting with by mail for years, a New York writer named Renzo, wrote to me saying at last he was coming to L.A., he insisted on staying at the Château Marmont because of a story I’d written about the place long ago. “If I can’t stay at the old Garden of Allah,” he wrote, “I can at least mingle with its ghosts.”
By then, of course, Andre Belajz had bought the place and was redoing the rooms with the advice and consent of Helmut Newton, who at the age of seventy stayed there on the fifth floor, making sure no one went too far—or not far enough.
I had once, when I was very young, visited a man at the Château Marmont who drank Wild Turkey and tried to convince me to read Aleister Crowley, the Satanist-type “magician”—my first memory of the place. The rooms in those days were unfashionably sad enough to commit suicide in, and, in fact, that to me was the Château’s charm, that it didn’t have any objections to one’s committing suicide. Things since then had gone steadily downhill, which everyone I knew enthusiastically approved of, insisting on staying at the Château no matter how producers’ secretaries tried to convince them the Sunset Marquis, say, at least had room service. “I don’t care if I can’t get a view,” they’d say, “just get me a room.”
Now, of course, the new management had replaced all of the shower heads, installed new refrigerators, and even ventured into the brave new world of room service (not that anyone got much more than chicken salad, orange juice, or fruit plates—though you could have something hot if you were enterprising), but still the only reason anything was off-white at the Château was because it had once been just plain white.
So when they wanted to put Renzo in the Peninsula or Four Seasons, he refused, saying, “I won’t run into anyone I know there; everyone I know stays at the Château.”
Renzo had called me from his room saying, “I like it here a lot, the elevator is slow, but . . .”
“I’ll call you from the lobby,” I said. “I’ll come get you.”
SO I WAS in the lobby of the Château Marmont when about five of those gorgeous new kids they have nowadays, people in their early twenties, rattled up the stairs from the garage, the boys with that short hair you see in Armani ads, and the girls with short hair too, and then, to my delight and amazement, one of the boys looked at me and said, “I know you, don’t I?”
He had those silvery eyes that seemed familiar to me and a kind of titian hair that very few people ever could pull off, except for Kate Lake, who, I realized, must be this kid’s mother. I mean, being art deco ran in the family.
“I’m Dylan Lake Gregson,” he said, confirming my guess.
“Well,” I said, missing a beat, and then adding, as I do when at a loss for words, “far-out!”
“I recognize you from my mother’s opening at Earl McGrath’s gallery in L.A.,” he said. “Someone said you wrote that Jim Morrison piece. I thought it was great. He stayed here, too, didn’t he?”
“He fell out of a window here,” I said. “I think he was only visiting David Crosby.”
“What window?” he wondered, forgetting all else.
The desk clerk had finally gotten off the phone and handed Dylan his keys as Renzo came down and emerged from the slow elevator looking more like New York City than you or I could dream of in our philosophies. This was why I had such a crush on him. Even though he was wearing a green shirt and black jeans, he looked as though he could be in a black cape on his way to the opera; there was something about him that was an elegant vampire. At least with no tan he reminded me of Vicky Lake that way.
Dylan noticed Renzo and said to him, “I loved your last book, but I loved all your books.”
I introduced Dylan, and Renzo said, “Oh, so your mother is the artist, the great one. I bought a small painting that I could hardly afford when she first started out; I was broke a whole summer afterward, stuck in New York, just me and that painting.”
“She’d be flattered,” Dylan said. “Could you sign a book for me if I leave it at the desk?”
“I’d be happy to,” Renzo said. “Where did you two meet?”
“Oh,” I said, “it’s a long story.”
“What window did Jim Morrison fall out of?” Dylan asked, again.
“One of the bungalows,” I said. “I never knew which one exactly. I think over the driveway, though.”
“I’ll go look,” Dylan said, then saw his friends were gone. “I guess everyone’s upstairs already. Great meeting you,” he said to Renzo; to me he said, “It is a long story, isn’t it.”
He laughed, leaned over, and said so only I could hear, “Vicky never got over it. But she always did love you.” He kissed me, and he smelled of peonies, and then he ran up the stairs to join his beautiful friends.
“So,” Renzo said, “first show me the window and then tell me the long story.”
“I don’t know what window it was,” I said. “Someone said he fell out of a second story, I heard it was one of the bungalows.”
“You knew Jim well, did you?” he asked, and looked at me like Jim would have looked at me when he heard something too L.A. for words—alarmed.
“Just for cheap thrills,” I said.
“He seemed more like the expensive-trouble kind,” Renzo said, “expensive regrets.”
I laughed and said, “Well, in those days we thought we’d live forever. We thought the more we had to regret, the better. Besides, we didn’t believe death applied to us personally.”
“Yeah,” Renzo said, “well, I was in Vietnam.”
“You were?” I asked. He didn’t seem the type; he never wrote about it in his books; it was never in his bios.
“Maybe I’ll tell you about it later,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “So, tell me about Dylan. How you know him. The long story.”
“Hey,” I said, “it’s still early. Let’s get in my car, I’ll show you the house. From the past.”
I took his hand and led him out the front of the Château Marmont and then around to the back where I always park if I am just going to be there a short while, not wanting to get involved with the difficult parking lot underneath the place. My little Honda Civic station wagon with the leopard-skin seat covers awaited us, and I threw all the books usually on the passenger seat into the back and he sat down. “I love these seat covers,” he said. “They’re very you, aren’t they?”
A huge jacaranda tree in someone’s backyard had dropped blossoms on the street next to my car, a lavender puddle of sticky petals.
I got in my seat and turned on the car. My radio went on too. It was right after 3:00 p.m. and the verdict was just being announced. “And now,” the announcer said, “the jurors are returning to the courtroom.”
“Is that?” he asked. Everyone in the country knew about Rodney King and the cops on trial.
“‘Yeah,” I said, pulling out of the spot and heading toward where Kate’s old house still was—a longer drive than I remembered—as the jury from Simi Valley informed the world that the police in the Rodney King episode weren’t guilty of so much as hiding evidence, much less using “undue force.” The ten verdicts fell like empty zeros into the air, and I felt like a person who’d mistaken a mirage for an oasis, as if each of the counts had been cruelly transformed into “Greetings from the Land That Time Forgot!”
“Oh,” Renzo said, “oh, oh, oh! Were those people blind or what? I’m stunned. What is undue force, then?”
“You know,” I said, “it’s just so hard to believe that once there was a time, you know, back in the early seventies when I actually thought we’d won. I mean, I thought our side was so right, we could never lose again.”
“But we were still in Vietnam,” he said, “even so.”
I think one of the reasons it seemed in the seventies that we couldn’t lose was Watergate. There was Nixon, this man my father had been insisting was a crook for so long, who actually was a crook.
And then we were getting rid of Nixon and were getting out of Vietnam and women could have abortions and the CIA was found to have illegally kept records on three hundred thousand citizens. It seemed a shoo-in that we’d won.
And if we’d only had a dashing leader, we might have.
But no, all the people who could have inspired us dumped girlfriends like Mary Jo Kopechne into ponds. If ever a country was ready to get rolling and be good, I thought it was us, then. But did this happen? No. Charisma on the wrong side happened. People on our side who could have kept their eye on the ball, got sidetracked. “White backlash” happened.
And there was something in the voices of the men in the L.A.P.D. that was so full of being victimized, they sounded like movie stars giving interviews about not being able to go anywhere without being asked for autographs.
“I can’t listen to this,” I said, turning the radio off as I drove down an old canyon road that I remembered from long ago, saying, “If you haven’t been to this house before, you can never get there.”
The old road was rising high over Hollywood, the pavement old and potholed, and I remembered Vicky following Zack up there the first time, saying, “I don’t know how they found this place, I really don’t.”
IT WAS THE early seventies, right after Walter had left and my first piece had been published that I met Vicky Lake and her sister, Kate, who’d just married Zack Gregson, this total doll ex-surfer movie producer who, Vicky explained, had been offered a job as head of production at one of the studios, which to me at the time seemed like a perfectly obvious symptom of our side’s having won. Before that, the people in executive positions at studios had always worn ties and tried to be “patriotic” and been way too old and ridiculously out of it as only people in Hollywood studios could be, never knowing anything until it was too late and by the time a fad or tidal wave of events—say, like rock and roll—hit the movies, it was so hopelessly dolled up, it was phony beyond belief. But now with Zack there, it was obvious complete bullshit was on its way out. And we weren’t going to stand for it anymore.
Or at least we had a chance.
Zack was, on principle, against bullshit in a big way, having produced several extremely arty movies that became all the rage, using actors who’d never been in anything before, making stars out of sows’ ears, stars who insisted they’d only work if Zack were guarding the scripts from having fake happy endings, keeping locations grounded in reality, and using actresses willing to risk looking like actual people who chewed gum.
Zack’s power increased because none of the old Hollywood types even wanted to know what was happening. I mean, if the old Hollywood had made a movie about the Beatles, they would have used hairspray.
It was obvious when Vicky and I went out on the Sunset Strip at night that the whole world was changing and that we had won, although Vicky was too square to appreciate it; she was such a confirmed preppy, refusing to so much as use eye makeup, always dressed in loafers and socks, khaki pants or a navy-blue skirt, these plain white shirts buttoned up to her chin or else cardigans buttoned up to her chin, in an age when all around her, including me, were dressing for sex, sex, sex, and more sex. I mean, back then I had a 1940s red dress, rayon with yellow flowers, cut on the bias, slashed into my cleavage merrily, which I shortened just in case, and with which I wore these red high-heeled sandals with ankle straps. And if I were really pushing it, I’d wear a red hat with a red flower and then eye makeup, no lipstick (my attempt at the natural look), and a boa.
