L.A.WOMAN (16 page)

Anyway as my mother once said, “I don't know anything about politics—or rather I know too much to care.” (“And
besides”
she added, “nothing works.”)

However, I felt oafish enough doing a good deed, but having to explain you had no ulterior motive and were just doing a good deed out of contrariness was more trouble than even contrariness was worth.

In fact the only way a good deed didn't look oafish was
when it went by so fast it seemed like an accident and you didn't know who to thank anyway. . . . (Presents, on the other hand, should be wrapped so they wouldn't be mistaken for accidents.)

Perhaps the thing I liked best about being perfect of course was that in those days it made women an inspiration for men, so men could be geniuses. Since not only was it a family tradition to inspire men, but also the only way I could hang out with the artists in Barney's Beanery, I was supremely certain that what I was doing was not just fun, but noble.

Which was why I went out every night and made sure to go to a lot of parties, since it's no good being an inspiration if no one knows.

Anyway it helped to be responsible if I seemed hell-bent-for-leather since nobody suspected it was just a red herring and most people thought of me as a tornado.

A hot tomato tornado.

But meanwhile, underneath it all, all I wanted was the American Dream, to get my parents a bigger house than they got me.

· · ·

About a week after I was twenty-one, Goldie took me to lunch at Musso's to celebrate my birthday late and while we were on our second drink she wanted to know what I was doing with my life, and since it seemed like a nice time for us to open a restaurant, a place where people in L.A. could sit down, I asked her if she was interested.

“But I have a job,” she cried. “I hate cooking!”

“That's okay,” I explained, “nobody's eating these days anyway, they're taking diet pills, we can open just a bar.”

Goldie had looked awful ever since Mad Dog Tim left her in Watts and she moved into Hollywood with Ophelia and got a job in a Christmas card factory and married her third Trotskyite husband, the nice one. But she looked at least seventy years old or forty or some age like that which wasn't
becoming, and her nice husband was such a stodgy influence that even when I was seventeen and didn't want to go to New Jersey, I wasn't willing to risk having him get mad at me for something like marijuana just because it was a silly felony.

Goldie, I decided, had had no fun at all for too long, and she ought to have, since being serious didn't become her coloring.

“We'll open our own restaurant,” I told her abruptly.

“We what?” She actually laughed aloud, looking much younger in spite of wearing so much navy blue.

“That's right,” I cried, “our own place, for everybody,
le tout d'L.A.!”

“Well, do you think really . . . ?” By this time, Goldie (whose black hair had already fallen down her back after her third martini, although it had been severely knotted when she came in) had lipstick marks on all three glasses growing fainter and fainter, but then I too was on my third martini (being twenty-one was so educational), and there we were, both drunk. Most of the people by then were gone as it was nearly three, which was the earliest I'd so far been so drunk so fast. The place was a large warm red-leather and varnished-wood cavern with those Belgian hunt murals not painted by the WPA (or they'd have been on the fox's side), and we both had delusions of grandeur or I never could have gotten her to quit her job—she just got up and telephoned saying she was not going back to the Christmas card factory tra-la ever again. (She'd only gotten the job anyway out of loyalty to Mad Dog Tim.)

By the next day though, Goldie changed her mind, calling me up to say, “I can't make sandwiches, much less start a restaurant, I'm very sorry, but I can't.”

“Oh,” I replied, “you? Sorry?”

“But you were so great, getting me to quit that job, all I've wanted to do for years is teach dance and now I'm doing it.”

“You are?”

“I've put a deposit on Teretsky's old studio, it's just a mess now,” she laughed, “but after we clear it out, you'll see, it'll be great.”

“Is that where you first met Lola?” I asked.

“We all danced there,” she said, “but you know, I haven't woken up looking forward this way since those days.”

It was awfully close, because if Goldie hadn't had dancing to fall back on, I'd have wrecked her life if you asked me.

“At least somebody in the family has some common sense,” she decided, “but nobody on my side. Maybe you inherited it from your mother.”

“Me!” I cried, mortified.

“Or psychic, or something,” she said.

“Oh,” I replied, relieved since Goldie obviously didn't know what common sense was if she got it mixed up with psychic.

But Goldie was one of the easier ones since there were other well-meaning friends and relatives who weren't so easy to lose.

There was my father's friend Robert and his wife Lenore who collected real estate and only took me to fancy places like the Scandia. Robert said, “How can you waste your time on something that won't make money?”

“Didn't you used to write plays?” I asked.

“Never mind,” Lenore said, “you've got to take some class—just something—instead of just drifting.”

“Maybe I'll take . . . photography,” I said, “like Sam.”

“I hear you got there too late,” Robert said.

“Did you know him?” I asked.

“We're not here to talk about Sam,” Lenore said.

“You knew him, didn't you?” I asked her.

“When we lived in San Francisco,” Lenore said, looking at her shoes, “briefly.”

And there was my Aunt Lily who suggested the physical therapy class, my own friend who decided computer
programming school was for me, and tons of other people who started telling me what to do and couldn't stop. Maybe I made people nervous by refusing to worry about anything, but I always knew everything would be okay because if worse came to worse I could always be a mistress. Or something with sin involved. And how anybody could look at me and think I'd be anything else when my hair was almost like Brigitte Bardot's I never knew. Sometimes they forgot we were in Hollywood.

But I was already much further into HOLLYWOOD than most of my parents' friends. It was like all they ever knew was the movies about Hollywood whereas to me the Sunset Strip was ten times more immediate than a movie. Plus it was alive.

And before rock'n'roll took it over, it was straight out of
Guys and Dolls
only with huge convertibles and rum drinks. And men with guns. And girls with black gloves up to their elbows in the daytime. (Even
I
wore them.)

So when they asked me if I considered working for the telephone company, I couldn't help it if I made them nervous, I refused to worry about jobs when Sunset Boulevard was a block away.

· · ·

And of course there was always Grandma who accused me of not getting married because I was trying to kill her.

“Oh, shut up,” I replied.

“Each day you're like a knife in my heart,” Grandma added.

“Another one!” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Everything anyone ever did, you say that about,” I said, “I'm surprised it worked on anyone even back then.”

(But of course, Grandma was still poised and ready to wreck anyone's life in a big way, old-fashioned or not.)

“Tell me what Helen was like,” I said.

“Oi, she was so miserable when she got married, it was a tragedy,” Grandma began.

(But who made sure she got married? . . .)

· · ·

Ophelia confessed to me, “I never knew what to do either, so I got married.”

“I'm saving that as a last resort,” I said.

“But you know so many men,” Ophelia said, “isn't there even one for you?”

“They're all adjectives,” I said, “they all make me feel modified; even a word like
girl friend
gives me this feeling I've been cut in half. I'd rather just be a car, not a blue car or a big one, than sit there the rest of my life being stuck with some adjective.”

“Oh,” said Ophelia.

“Friends I don't mind,” I said. “But how can you stop at just one? There are so many.”

But I knew that some people thrived on stopping at one like my parents. In fact, being together seemed to make each of them greater. Now if that was how anyone modified me, I could see it might not be so bad. But waiting was fun too.

· · ·

The place I lived on Martel was sort of a mixture of Versailles and pagodas—I mean, it sort of looked like it was laid out in some kind of grand scale because the large house in the middle where originally a family who ran the place must have lived was built to make them feel like kings of all they surveyed, just like Marie Antoinette except that instead of it being as far as the eye could see which was the plan at Versailles, this place was surrounded by a court of bungalows which made it impossible to see out further than the immediate courtyard itself—because even if they tried to look out the front windows at the street, they were stopped by this trellis which was like Franny's old house, only this one ran twice as long in front and was overgrown not with
delicate wisteria tangles, but with those little lavender bush flowers (which also grow in Florida where the town of Lantana became the home of the
National Enquirer),
but by then the trellis had caved in from so much lantana when it rained. The rooftops of the main house and bungalows were decorated with wooden pagoda ornaments painted chocolate brown to blend with the stucco walls which were sort of a chocolate-milk shade. And the wishing well in front had fish in it.

It was just the kind of place people who've never lived in Hollywood before have to get out of their system before they find an ordinary place with a garbage disposal and windows that close and let the dream be rented anew. But once I moved in myself, I never ever wanted to move again (except to the Normandy Towers which was a castle out of
Sleeping Beauty
and crazier than Disneyland, only whenever a place was vacant, I was always too broke so some nouveau New York actor usually moved in instead). In fact, once I took over Franny's black cocktail dress outfits and Monroe Lay starlet life, I was so busy living in Hollywood that things like garbage disposals slipped my mind.

The inside of my place was painted like a cream beach bungalow and the canvas shades were striped like beach umbrellas and all the furniture was that motel vacation furniture that made the half-a-living room next to the half-a-bedroom look like it was only someplace to change clothes before you ran back into the festivities quickly, so as not to miss a moment. (Franny's cowgirl hat was still hanging on the wall from when she lived there.)

Looking out at the green lawns of Versailles from the beachy interior of St.-Tropez made me feel so luxurious sometimes, I wanted to lie in bed propped up so I could gaze out forever, especially when it rained; when it rained in those days, Hollywood was heaven.

I had guys coming out of my ears like streetcars. Only
instead of one coming by every ten minutes, like they were supposed to, the old ones never left so my life grew dense with simultaneous romance. Lovers were like the lantana before the trellis caved in.

The first six months I went around being perfect after I started working at the Oriental, I went out to parties, gallery openings, and Barney's like there was no tomorrow and came home only to change clothes. But suddenly my desire to go out every night vanished and friends assumed love had wiped me off the scene. People were often missing who fell in love. But I was only falling into a darkroom.

Until Yorick—the Englishman who taught nuclear physics at Cal Tech at twenty-six but wanted to live in Hollywood so he could audition for cowboy parts on TV (!)—moved into the bungalow in front, cameras to me were something only a man could understand for they had too many buttons if you were only a girl.

However, Yorick took one look at some watercolors I painted and went and got his camera, insisting that understanding anything at all including mechanical buttons had nothing to do with gender.

“Let me show you a picture of my sister,” he said, showing a girl in his wallet who looked like Charlotte Rampling except she wore a stethoscope. “Looking at her,” he said, “you'd never think she was a surgeon.”

“With a knife and everything?”

“So here's how this thing works,” he began.

I mean being a surgeon made learning how to work cameras seem like child's play.

A rich child of course.

Who practiced diligently twelve hours a day.

Because it was like the piano—either you played chopsticks by only taking pictures outside at high noon, or else you could sightread something even though it had six flats
and had been written in 7/16 time. And take pictures by moonlight.

And the more I knew about photographs, the better Sam's were. They practically breathed. He never indulged in being anything but right. The easier it all looked, and the more conventional the composition and subject, the less I could figure out where the light he used came from. Shadows never fell across anything, they only made lines—for definition—between fingers. My father wrote that Sam used only natural light which made me even more nonplussed, of course, until finally two or three years after I got back from Rome I called Sam's mother and drove down to her house in Boyle Heights across the street from the Evergreen Cemetery.

“Could I borrow Sam's films?” I asked.

“Who needs them,” she replied. “Take them, take it all away with you—it's only using room in the garage.”

His mother was four feet nine and was grating carrots for split pea soup in the kitchen when I arrived and we went out the kitchen door to the garage. All of Sam's things—shoe-boxes of negatives spilling onto the greasy floor, prints curling up in crates, his reels of film I'd dragged home from Paris—were left all but forgotten against rusty rakes and hoes.