Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints (26 page)

M
y Hollywood years were encrusted with a sparkly combo of tawdriness and tinsel.

In 1980 I moved into an apartment building in Hollywood, California, called the Fontenoy. This French chateâu–style structure was drenched with poorly researched movie-star lore. An older resident started the whole thing by claiming that Marilyn Monroe had once lived on the sixth floor, sharing an apartment, and many lipsticks and stiletto heels with Shelley Winters.

Not to be outdone, we new tenants all made stories up about our various apartments.

“Did you know that Cyd Charisse once tried to jump out of the window of my apartment? You can see her heel marks on the windowsill.”

“That’s nothing. Apparently Buddy Hackett used to live in my apartment. He left all his TV dinners in the freezer.”

Looking at the dusty raggle-taggle of human flotsam who now occupied the cockroach-infested apartments, it was hard to imagine the former glory days of the Fontenoy. The only celeb resident during my tenure was Nicolas Cage, who wasn’t a celeb at the time, just an affable, thick-haired ingenue.

The dearth of celebs in no way diminishes the fondness I feel for my Hollywood years. I have nothing but warm, fuzzy, nostalgic feelings for my old neighborhood, and with good reason. The Fontenoy was just up the street from Frederick’s of Hollywood and the magical sleaze of Hollywood Boulevard. Most of the local shops, taking their cue from Frederick’s, sold stripper clothing, high-heeled shoes, and theatrical wigs. If you wanted ordinary groceries, you had to drive miles to a supermarket. If you wanted edible panties, Frederick’s was a two-minute stroll past the transvestite prostitutes who worked the intersection of Yucca and Whitley streets in
Flash-dance
T-shirts, acid-washed jeans, and pearlized scrunch boots.

Also within walking distance were the Max Factor Museum, which boasted a beauty calibrating machine; the Scientology Center, which did not yet boast Tom Cruise; the
Hollywood Wax Museum and a home for teenage runaways called Hudson House. With my predilection for everything camp and/or grotesque, this location suited me down to the ground. I could pop out and look at the stars embedded in the sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard any time of the day or night—“Look, there’s Pat Boone! There’s Phyllis Diller!” Living at the Fontenoy was like being at a Butlins Holiday Camp all year round.

The neighborhood boasted several Butlinesque themed eateries.

Top of the list was a “family restaurant” called The Tick-Tock. The walls of The Tick-Tock were covered with ticking and gonging clocks of all varieties, a cruel reminder to the mostly older patrons of the fact that they would soon be
no longer with us.

It was here among the cuckoo and carriage clocks that I witnessed my very first Heimlich maneuver. A glamorous senior citizen in a turban—a Gloria Swanson manqué—suddenly clutched her throat with both hands and began to make choking noises.

“Aiiieeyye! Madre de Diós! She shokin’!” screamed a sturdy Mexican waitress.

The observant Latina then tangoed the patron from her banquette. Her movements seemed well-practiced. She grabbed the distressed senior round the middle and, with vigorous upward hugging motions, dislodged half a semimasticated dinner roll from her trachea. The blockage hit the floor with a light
splat.
A round of applause followed. The hungry patron returned to her tuna melt. She left a big tip.

Other Hollywood residents were less fortunate. Horrid gangs would take drive-by potshots at the local trannies. On more than one occasion we saw a large, ungainly she-male crumple to the pavement and lie motionless.

There was drama on every corner.

One night some of the Hudson boys decided, somewhat rashly, to torch their home. Like rioters who ravage their own neighborhood, these hoodlums were experiencing that strange, primordial impulse to shoot oneself in the foot. We watched from our seventh-floor window as the homeless lads poured lighter fluid on their nicely renovated house, funded probably by charitable contributions from someone like Merv Griffin or Barbra Streisand, and then danced jubilantly round the burning building. This was the equivalent of inmates in a battered women’s shelter deciding to batter themselves. The next day the homeless boys sat staring at the charred debris looking surprised and annoyed, as if wondering who had done the damage.

*  *  *

I shared my Fontenoy years with a person called Mundo. A painter and a window dresser, Mundo was soulful, humble, and unique. He was in his early twenties. We were in love in the insane, thoughtless way that afflicts the young, which sounds like a cliché out of a cheesy romance novel but is nonetheless quite accurate. After two tumultuous years, our relationship morphed, much to our mutual relief, into a loving friendship.

We had a great deal in common. We were first-generation immigrants in the land of opportunity. For us this represented
an opportunity to have oodles of fun and spend a great deal of time mocking each other’s ethnicity while also being fascinated by it. I was intrigued by his Mexicanness, he was enthralled by everything that was trendy and English. He introduced me to Frida Kahlo paintings and
ranchera
music; I introduced him to Boy George acolytes like Pinkietessa Braithwaite and the pop star Marilyn. They had recently moved from London and lived just around the corner.

For Mundo and me, being trendy was our most intense and satisfying area of commonality. I had long since given up trying to find the Beautiful People. The few rich international types that I had met, especially the European ones, all seemed irredeemably naff and hopelessly self-obsessed. Yes, they wore caftans, but what, in 1980, could be more out-of-date? They spent their days dabbling in various forms of spirituality and experimenting with new beauty treatments. Most damning of all, these B.P.’s all seemed to have the same lousy sense of humor: in the world of the Beautiful People, accidentally dropping a teaspoon on the floor, missing a plane, or forgetting to wind your watch all seem to qualify as riotously funny, thigh-slapping occurrences.

If you are gorgeous and wealthy, you lack the motivation to develop a great wit. If you are a marginalized freak like me or Marilyn or Pinkie, a caustic tongue is a prerequisite for attention if not survival.

I now settled happily for the trendy people, not because they were fashionable but because they were wicked and funny and irreverent.

*  *  *

There was no shortage of activities for us marginalized trendoids in Hollywood. This was the early eighties, when if you were au courant, you were probably worshiping ABC, Bow Wow Wow, and the Thompson Twins. Every week another new band of hopefuls—Spandau Ballet, Madness, the Specials, Siouxsie Sioux—was playing at the Roxy or the Whiskey a Go-Go. My clearest memory from this period is watching Nina Hagen perform dressed as a nun. After a couple of numbers she turned around, revealing a lifelike black rubber phallus sticking, at a forty-five degree angle, through the folds of her habit. Bon appétit!

When we weren’t watching live music, Mundo and I were flitting about in Vivienne Westwood pirate gear at “New Romantic” clubs with names like The Veil, The Fake, and Club Lingerie. It was good, old-fashioned, pointless fun. We took full advantage of the vogue for costumey dress-up. I have boxes of snaps of us in various guises: Mundo dressed as Valentino, me as Betty Rubble, Mundo as a goat-legged Bacchus, and me as Queen Elizabeth II. I am probably the only white male on the planet who has ever cross-dressed as the African songstress Miriam Makeba. The apotheosis of our overdressed trendiness occurred when we were recruited for the Kim Carnes “Bette Davis Eyes” video. That’s my gloved hand in the opening shot.

Don’t judge me too harshly: if you’re not going to be a trendy, superficial poseur in your twenties, when
are
you going to do it?

*  *  *

We supported ourselves and our habits with money made from installing display windows in shops around town. Despite
the foofy nature of our social life, Mundo and I took our work very seriously. We prided ourselves on our familiarity with the prop rental houses that dotted Los Angeles. Here lurked the surreal follies which were the very nuts and bolts of the movie industry. These included, but were not limited to, terrifying oversize carnival heads, stuffed rattlesnakes, fake scenic rocks on wheels, charging bulls on wheels, alert collie dogs and limp hit-by-a-car collie dogs, life-size anatomy dolls, and fake salamis and cheeses of every size and description. Our favorite trick was to locate something impossibly grotesque and then see if we could seamlessly integrate it into the display window of a fancy Beverly Hills luxury goods store.

When I met Mundo, I was already known for my outré displays at a store called Maxfield Bleu. I had evolved considerably from the pedestrian fashion vignettes of my City à la Mode days. My windows now regularly included such things as coffins, suicides, and mannequins juggling taxidermied cats.

Mundo came along and made me look like a lightweight. His window displays—in sharp contrast to his mild manner—were completely insane. He was, for some reason, infinitely less risk-averse than even I. This may have been due to the fact that I had a green card and he did not; i.e., he had nothing to lose.

Together we reached new heights of provocation. One of the windows for which I am best known, a vignette inspired by a local news item, depicting the abduction of a newborn baby by a vicious coyote from a suburban home, was one such
collaboration. After complaints from individuals claiming kin with the abductee, we removed the window.

When we worked together, I was a moderating influence. When Mundo went off on his own, he really went over the top. One day I stopped by a store where he was working to see what he was up to. Even I was taken aback. Somewhere in the bowels of some far-flung studio prop rental warehouse, he had managed to find a series of stuffed warthog heads. He had mounted them on large, shocking pink plywood panels and juxtaposed them next to fluorescent-hued Norma Kamali dresses. I arrived just in time to see the apoplectic store owner gesticulating wildly in front of the window, while an oblivious Mundo—a can of hair spray in one hand and a ratting comb in the other—lovingly coiffed the tufty heads of his warthogs.

His ideas were very proto Damien Hirst. Unlike Mr. Hirst and many of the new post-skill artists of today, Mundo was an accomplished painter. He used this skill to earn extra money, painting commissioned portraits.

Having no such talents, I augmented my window-dressing earnings with a T-shirt business. I silk-screened and hand-painted garments with designs of my own making and sold them to Melrose Avenue stores. When I needed a bit of extra cash, I would park on a side street, near my retailers, and sell them out of the back of my truck. This guerrilla salesmanship often yielded as much as five hundred dollars on a busy Saturday, which seemed like a fortune at the time.

As I look back on this entrepreneurial, skip-along period of my life, I realize what a huge role my T-shirt business
played in all aspects of my personal growth. The organizational and interpersonal skills which I acquired, through trial and error, transformed me into a fully functional human being. I’m not joking. I have absolutely no idea why people bother going to fancy colleges: everything you will ever need to know about life and more can be learned through the operation of a T-shirt business.

Example: the first time I delivered a bunch of T-shirts to a store, I shipped them out with an invoice tucked neatly inside the package. I felt very efficient and businesslike. When, thirty days later, I had received no payment, I became irate. I called the accounts office.

“Oh, you must be the brain surgeon who sent an invoice without a return address. Honey, your check is sitting right here. You do know what a check is, don’tcha, honey?”

I genuinely feel that prior to operating a T-shirt business I was a mentally subnormal, incompetent, trend-obsessed fool. And after three years in the T-shirt business, I became—without a hint of exaggeration—a world-class sage.

*  *  *

One day Mundo stopped by the studio where I silk-screened my garments. We chatted. He smoked a joint. Before leaving, he showed me a purple lump on his neck and asked me for a diagnosis.

“It’s just an ingrowing hair,” I said, instinctively playing it down and thereby doing a total Terry Doonan.

A couple of weeks later Mundo and I and a couple of friends, including his current boyfriend, Jef, were lolling round our glamorous oval-shaped pool. It was an evening of
giggling and synchronized swimming and cocktails with little umbrellas in them.

“A woman in the elevator told me Lana Turner once cracked her head on the bottom of this pool,” said Mundo, looking like a young Xavier Cugat in his vintage resort shirt and straw hat.

We all got fairly plastered and started making glamorous Lana Turner head-injury turbans out of our towels, climbing the palm trees, and taking snaps of each other. I still have those photographs. When I look at them I think, These were taken the night before our happy, silly, trendy Hollywood lives changed so irrevocably and horribly.

The next day.

Hungover and exhausted from the previous night’s capers, I came home early from work. I found Mundo sitting on the couch, staring out at the Capitol Records tower. He looked puffy-eyed.

“Are you high? You lazy Mexicans and your pot!” I mocked affectionately. (I always think the real purpose of a relationship is to provide a “safe space” for the voicing of such un-P.C. thoughts.)

He did not laugh. He kept on staring at Capitol Records.

“The doctor says it’s cancer. I have AIDS.”

I screamed. I did not cry tears. I just let out this weird, womanly wail. Over the next few months Mundo would try to imitate the noise I had made. He would laugh and tell me how like an outraged English matron I had sounded.

These were early days in the history of the Plague. I had heard about AIDS. I had read the landmark
Village Voice
piece a
few months before. I assumed this disease was something which afflicted the sexual outlaws of West Hollywood, Castro Street, and Greenwich Village, where excessive practices had somehow created a new affliction. I never imagined it could strike someone who did things like dressing up as a Fellini clown or buying Mexican pastries and then spending all weekend painting gorgeous still lifes of them while listening to his parents’ old La Lupe records.