Black Swans, page 7
“My God,” Vicky would complain, “is that what you’re wearing again!”
“Well,” I said, “I could leave the boa home.”
(Feather boas were so hot, they practically weren’t worth it.)
“Oh, holy Toledo,” she’d say, shaking her head.
I loved Vicky because she wrote great short stories that she was too shy to send out and I was always trying to encourage her, to no avail. We met at a tea party given by a woman poet who was a friend of mine and who’d met Vicky in a class the poet had given at UCLA.
The only trouble with Vicky was she had such a sharp tongue when she drank around men, they’d flee. I thought she didn’t like sex at all, so many frogs just popped out of her mouth around men, it seemed like, although she was so funny I stopped minding, especially after one night when we’d returned to my place (this little Hollywood bungalow), and she pushed me back on the bed, threw off her clothes, and the next thing I knew, I was in this sensually divine taboo tableau that went from curiosity to lust really fast, her white body reflecting the moonlight like a pure lily doing impure things. She smelled like peonies even though she never used any perfume; it was just how she smelled. She left before I fell asleep, and the next morning when she called to ask if she’d left her address book, I realized she didn’t remember, that she’d been in a blackout from drinking, and though, over the next three years, she did this often, she never remembered. I would have preferred her to notice, I figured it was none of my business. In those days, nobody knew blackouts were a symptom of alcoholism and all I knew was I loved her a lot and wished she’d spend the night. I never wondered if I was a lesbian because usually I only had sex with men and only slept with Vicky because she was so beautiful, and in those days anyone beautiful who pushed me backwards onto a bed got my full attention. And I thought Vicky was very brave, since if she didn’t like men and still liked sex, who else was left?
Meanwhile, her sister, Kate Lake Gregson, was moving into the fast lane of Hollywood society, the Hollywood of those days when we’d so assumed we’d won, it was all anyone could do not to feel bored, we felt so arrogant.
“Zack’s taking her up to this house,” Vicky said about a year after they’d married when Dylan, Kate’s baby, was two months old. “We’re going up there today, to see the house. Come with me.”
I went with Vicky, in her tan VW convertible, a Beetle, to the house that Kate and Zack were renting off the Sunset Strip where Kate was already having these soirees that everyone was going to, and we followed Zack and Kate up in his old surfer woody on this road I had taken Renzo on, a place you could never find unless you’d been there before, and at last, after what seemed like way too long, we came to a plateau overlooking L.A., as Renzo and I had now done, to this incredible palazzo with a huge garden, a large pool surrounded by urns with geraniums abounding, a tennis court, a parking lot, a view in case it was ever clear enough to see anywhere, and guest houses lots bigger than my bungalow by far.
“It’s a white elephant,” Zack said. “I can get it real cheap, what do you think?”
I mean, here was this man whose torso was so slender and boyish and whose hair was so thick and sexy and long and whose smile was so ridiculous, but then his mother was a movie star and they all had teeth like that, and he wore old jeans, a blue work shirt like everyone wore then, and he was just thirty, and he was offering Kate what in my opinion was The World. It wasn’t a town house in the upper eighties of New York, okay, but in L.A. terms, it was Everything. In fact, it was too much.
“I guess I could have a studio somewhere,” Kate, who’d graduated from Pratt Institute in New York and was a painter before she’d met Zack, said, “to work.”
“There’s a great room for that,” Zack said. “In fact, you could have a whole wing. The place is too big, that’s the trouble with it, why it’s so cheap.”
To me, though, the house seemed too much, cheap or no. The house belonged to a silent star who was now buried in the Hollywood Cemetery under a tombstone with a huge angel on top, naked and full of lust.
Just then, Haily arrived, Kate’s best friend who nobody but Kate could stand. Haily was the kind of woman who took people’s boyfriends when they weren’t looking and then wanted you to feel sorry for her because she had no friends. Except for Kate. Haily was even more in love with Kate than everyone else, and attempted to look just like her, dying her own dishwater brown hair dark red like Kate’s was naturally, even though Kate was so nonchalant about her beautiful hair that that day she just wore it in a long braid down her slender back. Kate was so otherworldly in her beauty that it was hard for me to believe her sister Vicky looked just like her except that the things Kate did to accentuate her beauty, Vicky refused to even consider. Kate, for example, used silvery eye shadow to bring out the silvery lime of her eyes; she often let her hair cascade down her back in a darkened red cloud, whereas Vicky chopped hers off at chin length and shoved it off her face in a bandanna. Kate wore low necklines so you could see her moon-colored body and her moon-shaped breasts, whereas Vicky divorced herself from her body and dressed to detract from it like preppies do, and while Vicky always wore either loafers or tennis shoes or else terrible low-heeled black scuffed pumps if she was really backed into a corner and had to go to a dinner party, Kate’s shoes were all silver, including the boots she wore that day with her Moroccan pants. Haily looked like a smudged charcoal drawing of Kate done by someone with no talent.
“Silver shoes,” Kate told me, “make me feel light.”
Vicky and Kate were the same height, but Kate seemed to float above people like some kind of angelic host, whereas Vicky slouched off to the side in chairs away from the light. Kate was a major force for letting the good times roll, whereas Vicky, at UCLA when I met her, was majoring in library science.
“I could never be like Kate,” Vicky explained, “she’s just too great. I’ve always felt like a spinster around her, I want to be a librarian like my aunts.”
So whereas the entire world was plunging into the feeling that at least reasonable, rational, hip people were going to rule the world and we could have fun, fun, fun, Vicky was quoting William Blake, saying “but too much fun is of all things most loathsome.”
No wonder I just loved her so much; who else would say such things?
“We want you to live with us,” Zack said to Vicky. “You’d be free to come and go as you wished, you could have a guest house.”
“No, no, no,” Vicky said, “I like my apartment. I’m growing petunias.”
“Oh,” Kate said to us all, shaking her head, “I knew you’d say that, I just knew it! You’ve never been any fun at all.”
“Petunias,” Vicky said, “are fun.”
“Maybe this house is too big,” I suggested, since it seemed to me if you got a house like that, even if it was cheap, you might do things you wouldn’t otherwise in order to keep it, like sell your soul to the devil.
As we left, Kate hugged me good-bye, and she, like Vicky, smelled of peonies (which must have been genetic, since Dylan smelled of them too, I later noticed).
And so everything hummed along in a state of mounting marvelousness. Kate and Zack and Dylan moved into the house and, without knocking down a single wall, turned the place that had been deserted and sad into a magnet for the fringe element that had now come into its own, and if the Château Marmont was their physical home usually, a party at Kate’s was their spiritual one. Her parties had a loose democracy, fun being their driving force, and everyone talked too much, they forgot they weren’t in New York.
Everyone felt safe and protected: no police ever found their way there, and no one boring ever stayed for long. Or else there was something steely inside Kate that prevented people from being boring. Just her presence made people want to be brilliant.
And then Zack was offered the job of president of his studio, on the condition that he produce Mighty Mo, a schlocky thriller nobody in their right mind could imagine him doing. Kate read the script, and when she was done, she threw it against their bedroom wall and said, “What crap! It’s not you, Zack. It can’t be.”
“I get to do five of the ones I want,” he said, “if I do this.”
“But by the time it’s done,” she said, “you won’t know who you are.”
They wanted him not only to agree to do it, but to produce it himself, attending to every detail, because they had several of those big old stars signed for it, and they wanted someone they could trust not to go over budget which, on little art movies, he never did.
I thought at first he wanted to do it because it would cement his power if it were a hit, and he did say, “They’ll let me do Faust if I do this.”
(Faust was a script he had that nobody but actors wanted to do; it was an extremely doubtful property.)
“You know,” Vicky said, “I kind of like this script, but I have no taste, I like bad movies.”
“I kind of like it too in a horrible way,” Zack said. “It’s corny. I miss those corny movies sometimes, the kind you just eat popcorn and it’s all happening for you.”
“Ohhhh,” Kate shouted, “you people are all crazy!”
“The other thing is,” Zack said, “we’d have to shoot in the Philippines, so I’d be gone a long time. I’d miss everything happening here.”
“Nothing’s happening here,” Kate snapped, sort of amazed that anyone would think the fact that her parties were so great would be a drawback to leaving town. “I’d miss you, is all.”
“Yeah,” he said, edging finally to the point, “well, I hear there’s great surf in the Philippines.”
“Aha!” I said. “You just want to go surfing!”
“Well,” he sighed, “the new boards are really great.”
So surfing was behind it all. Nobody yet knew that grown men would never get over surfing, that they’d stay surfers till their sixties and never quit ever. He was of that generation that was just finding out you could take the boy out of the ocean, but you couldn’t take the boy out of the ocean for long. He’d tried to be an adult, to keep his eye on the ball, but he got sidetracked.
“It’s all he ever wants to do, surfing. The only place we ever get to go for vacation,” Kate complained, “is Hawaii, that damned North Shore. We can’t go to Europe, New York, just water, water, everywhere!”
“I’ll take you to Europe when I get back,” Zack said.
“If I want to go to New York, I have to go alone!” she added. “It’s all you ever think about, surfing!”
“She’s just mad because she can’t get tan,” Zack said, as she stomped out of the bedroom in a huff.
It occurred to me that he shouldn’t have married someone who couldn’t get tan if he hadn’t intended to stay on land, but of course, he never should have gotten married if he was still by surfboard possessed.
“I’m not mad because I can’t get tan,” she wailed from the next room. “I’m mad because this movie sucks!”
And so for not very artistic reasons, Zack agreed to produce Mighty Mo and be president of the studio and a week later he left for the Philippines to “scout locations,” which, if I knew surfers, meant finding locations near empty beaches with great, curling waves.
MEANWHILE, THE NEW Journalism had arrived in a big way. When Tom Wolfe did it, putting thoughts into people’s heads in magazine articles, it made perfect sense, but when other people did it, like Lorna Danvers, it seemed like she was putting ideas only she would think into people’s heads. She wrote with such a mean-spirited, heavy hand, it seemed like the people she wrote about thought in tabloid headlines. But she had gotten an assignment to do the “new” Hollywood, and even though Lorna was boring, Kate let her hang around and invited her to one of her bigger parties.
“She’s a friend of a friend in New York,” Kate explained, “so she must not be too bad, even if her writing’s kind of shameless.”
We all met Lorna at Kate’s the night of a party, and hearing it was to be a cocktail party, Lorna wore this red-flannel muumuu with felt “cocktails” appliquéd all over it: martinis, manhattans, and champagne cocktails. She was the shape of a potato, had straggly hair, and just generally had the air of “I’m from New York, a thoughtful person, so looks don’t matter to me and shouldn’t to you, except you’re too L.A. to know better.”
And so a couple of months later, a cover story appeared with practically an exact replica of Kate on the front, stepping out of a Mercedes in silver boots, and slashed diagonally across this illustration was a headline that said IDLE HOLLYWOOD WIVES in scarlet.
“Oh, God,” Vicky cried over the phone to me, “can you believe it? Fifty-seven people called Kate before lunch to ask if she’d seen it. Friends from school. People from Philadelphia!”
(Vicky and Kate were from Philadelphia.)
The fact that Kate didn’t have a Mercedes didn’t matter, nor that the story was almost impossible to read, it was so green with envy. It had her shopping all day thinking shallow, dreadful thoughts invented by Lorna out of whole cloth.
But the cover was so like Kate, and horrible; you didn’t need the inside to be all wrong.
“Tell her it will blow over,” I said, though in those days I didn’t know these things did and was only guessing.
“She’s too mad,” Vicky said. “She thinks if Zack weren’t doing this movie it wouldn’t have happened. He can’t be reached; the phones are all down; there’s a hurricane there or something in the Philippines. Meet me at Nickodell’s, okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
Nickodell’s was not a place I normally went, there being no action there whatsoever, and Vicky only went there when she was so miserable she had to be somewhere they made white food, bland and reminding her of Philadelphia. She’d order gin and tonics (the worst, in my opinion, but preppies always drink them), and then she’d have lots of celery and radishes and olives from the cold glass tray, and then she’d eat these turkey croquettes they made there, covered in a white sauce, which I could only look upon with amazement, even though I could appreciate them in spirit.
Nickodell’s was shaped like a set from a Fred Astaire movie in the 1930s: it looked almost like a boat and almost like a banana-leaf backdrop. It was dark green outside and dimly lit inside with huge old smoky-smelling booths and very nice waitresses who understood Vicky perfectly.
“Honey,” the waitress looked at her and said, “what can I get you? Some nice soup?”
“Noooo,” Vicky shook her head and sighed, “I want a gin and tonic and turkey croquettes with lots of sauce.”
“I’ll make sure he puts extra,” she said and then looked at me unsympathetically, as though I were the cause of Vicky’s woe, and said, “You decided yet or what?” (They knew I wasn’t one of them, that I didn’t belong there.)
They brought Vicky her gin and tonic, she took a sip and said, “Golly, perfect.”
I had an Irish coffee that wasn’t as good as the Polo Lounge’s at the Beverly Hills Hotel but nothing was.
“So what’s Kate going to do?” I said. “She should sue them!”
“Lots of people wear silver shoes,” Vicky said. “She’s not going to sue them. What she says she’s going to do is what she’s always wanted anyway.”
“What’s that?” I said. How could anyone always want more than she had?
“She wants to move to New York,” Vicky said, “and paint.”
“Oh,” I said.
“She said, ‘At least if they give me bad reviews, it’ll be for something I did.’”
“But what about the Zack?” I said. I mean, women were leaving husbands in droves by then to prove themselves, it was all the rage and in fact, if you ask me, we’d be a lot better off if women lived in nunneries and men in monasteries and if we wanted to mingle, we’d have to sneak off, but leaving Zack, who pretty much let her do whatever she wanted, was overdoing it. Plus, as the Old Hollywood wives said afterward, the ones who dug in their heels for the long haul when they got a divorce and expected to be rich forever after, “Leaving the house like she did was not right. You don’t leave the house. You keep the house and change the locks!”
“She’s leaving,” Vicky said. “She’s got a friend in New York looking for a studio for her already. She’s leaving tomorrow. She’s taking Dylan.”
Looking back on it later, I even thought maybe this was the crack in the perfection of those times, the era when we were finally getting rid of Nixon and instead of running with the ball, we let everything slide for just an instant too far over to private life.
Zack, if only he’d stuck to the point, could have had everything. But they always change what “everything” means or maybe the concept of “success” just keeps changing when you reach a certain point. I don’t know, where I grew up we believed there was such a thing as selling out and that those interested in the arts shouldn’t do it.
RENZO AND I were wandering through the overgrown gardens and had come to a stone bench from the twenties, where we sat side by side, looking out over the smog-filled L.A. Basin, another smoldering day smelling of days gone by in the life of us all. The house itself was empty and closed, maybe forever; the pool was drained and sad; the place was as lonely as “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” by Hank Williams.
“I don’t know if I would have been that brave,” Renzo said. “This place could be paradise.”
“It was,” I said.
