L.A.WOMAN (18 page)

And the next thing after that was victims. I mean, if you were a lady, you were a sitting duck from then on.

Being a lady did fascinate me. It happened, sometimes, to the best people—like maybe when Lola had collapsed into propriety and married Sam. Somehow, for me, myself, it never occurred to me even out of the clear blue sky. Like once when I went to New York to see Harry, I was standing
in front of the gallery, when two rotten little six-foot-two teenagers flew by and grabbed my purse when nothing but my driver's license—not money—was in it. Before they'd gotten fifteen feet away, I said, “There's no money, really, look.”

(They stopped and looked, they were so surprised.)

“Leave it,” I said, “I need my driver's license.”

So they did. (But then, teenagers I understand, especially rotten ones.)

Or another morning when I woke up in bed with this man sitting on top of me holding his hand over my mouth saying, “Don't scream.” Naturally I screamed, although I really wanted to make him stay and explain how he had become a rapist in this day and age—only by then he had climbed out the window saying “Oh, shit.” (As though
I
were the wet blanket.)

Ladies and victims never reason with teenaged purse-snatchers or rapists and that's why I knew I wasn't one.

Sheila, a girl my age who went to L.A. High and lived next to me in the court, worked part time in a travel agency and looked like a Botticelli—and she was worse than me. I mean, when I moved into that court and had tea with Sheila the first day, we decided to list all the men we had slept with—we were both not twenty-one yet—only I forgot their names after counting 50 I remembered, and Sheila got to 150 (she could even remember last names) before she got confused.

Stuff like jealousy and outrage and sexual horror tactics like that, which had been used to squash girls like us and keep us from having fun for thousands of years, now suddenly didn't stand a chance because Sheila and the rest of us weren't going to get pregnant, die of syphilis, or get horrible reputations around L.A.—where an L.A. woman had always pretty much painted the town anything she wanted.

And anyway stuff like jealousy was too late if you were going to be in love with Jim.

And if you were me, you would.

There he was in a dark nightclub I'd gone one night when I was twenty-three and he was twenty-two and poetry was curling around him like smoke. He smelled like leather and alcohol and nightclubs but he looked blind like a marble statue. Outside was the Sunset Strip but inside he was living on borrowed time. And I was wearing gardenias.

It was 1966 and I wanted the whole thing. Fast.

We were being introduced by someone normal, the only thing normal about us.

“Let's go,” I said.

His voice broke the silence like putting a card on a house of cards, and he said, “Go?”

“Yeah,” I said, “to my house.”

“I'm with the band,” he said.

“Oh, don't tell me we have to wait till after you play!”

“I don't play,” he said, “I work.”

In those days I used to think that love at first sight and happiness were the same thing.

But after love at first sight with Jim I noticed that although he was much taller than Sam and in fact even though I was now taller than Sam, I felt the same way about Jim as I once had with Sam which was—Not Woman Enough.

No matter how high my heels were, I could very easily have been with Sam if I shut my eyes.

Of course, trying to be woman enough for someone who couldn't even get enough woman if he lived to be a hundred and
six
was impossible—it was like volunteering for astronaut school—I mean, you knew there were thousands of other just-as-qualified volunteers ready to follow him anywhere, only as the groupie pool deepened, there were always ones who'd follow him anywhere, only naked, or in a mink coat, or with hair like fire.

But then, once I realized he liked hair like fire, I did mine red too. In fact, I looked untamed and restless enough in the
clothes I went out in for Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible put together. But looking woman enough was so hard—having to pincurl my hair so it would look art nouveau-y (which you
had
to look—in a brutal sort of way, of course) and
being
woman enough when you're on acid was just . . . I mean, walking out on the balcony of the Tropicana at 4:00
A.M.
Sunday morning with Jim—naked—was just . . . I mean, I could see his point, it
was
cool—but I was chicken. That was the long and the short of it. Just not woman enough.

And even if I
won,
like Lola, and actually did get to make breakfast for him forever—all I kept remembering was my mother the time she watched Lola making Sam breakfast in San Francisco when he dumped his eggs in the garbage and said, “I can't eat this—you can't even scramble eggs!”

At which point my mother told Lola to sit down and proceeded to make breakfast herself, “. . . and he didn't dare talk that way to
me,”
she said, “I mean, hell, in Texas men knew how to be a devil, they didn't sit around complaining about scrambled eggs. Now my uncle, he was a high fuck—”

“A what?” I asked.

“And listen,” she ended, “my mother married guys like Sam, but they were
real!”

Until I met Jim the pictures I took were so artsy they weren't art but I was so mad at
his
L.A., his Symptom of the Apocalypse attitude, that every picture I began to take was proof he was wrong—and they really
worked.
They were casual, but in an obsessed kind of way since I wanted to make L.A. look as though even a child could see that the bungalows and palm trees were only bungalows and palm trees and not out to kill the rest of the world. And that the papier-mâché shacks built forty years earlier by a swindler weren't a swindle, because people were still merrily living in them and waiting for something to knock them over with a feather—snow, never mind an apocalypse.

And I got so casual that I became a professional and quit the Oriental the day I got my first check for three hundred dollars for an album cover, which I thought was a fortune.

By the time I quit the Oriental Jim was a star and I was a free-lance photographer actually getting checks for pictures because I got so casual I could even pass for professional. But I was much too scared of Jim to ever take his picture.

The trouble with Jim was that he was so much worse in person that I stayed in shock until he left. His silences were so much more deadly, the elliptical remarks so much emptier, and the nonstop fury within him to capture the world's imagination was so religious and dignified and ironical that, like pain, you only remembered what it was like when it was too late.

In retrospect of course he seemed worth it.

In fact, from afar he was gorgeous. But he was too gorgeous in bed to be true, except if you wanted to borrow some of his borrowed time, which you might never get out of. (With Jim the end was at hand every night, and dawn was never a given.)

Someone once told me that greatness was a disease. And that must have been what was wrong with Jim. (Among other things.)

It was strange because in the middle of all that intensity when Jim was actually there in person, Ed Lakey was all I could think about. Ed Lakey kissing me in La Coupole and promising to make me a star—I mean, at least Ed let someone else be a star now and then. With Jim no one else was allowed to capture imaginations but him. He got so pissed off when someone else was a star that once when he was standing next to Janis Joplin at a party he yanked her hair so hard, she broke a bottle of Southern Comfort over his head and he had to go to the emergency hospital. The next night I sat across from her in Barney's when Jim came in and I heard her say, “Do you think he's still mad at me?”

She almost sounded like she hoped he was.

But he wasn't still mad except at his head being bandaged. So if she thought he'd be perfect for the guy in the Billie Holiday song who kicked girls down the stairs, she was sadly mistaken.

Maybe some people come into the world thinking things are too small and they can't do anything unless it's enormous, and like Jim the trouble was trying to find something enormous enough to leave a mark
with
—perhaps an eight-foot-high pencil—but that still didn't make the person pushing the pencil the right size.

Before I figured all this out, no matter when he called me I always knew those silences even before he said hello and had my shoes on and my car keys and was ready to go pick him up from the Troubador and lie there next to him all night still in all my clothes, just to make sure nobody took too many reds. And that there was a next day.

But then L.A. was filled with women keeping him alive—West Hollywood was a net to break his fall. He was passed from hand to hand like a trophy. And since he at least knew enough not to drive a car, he was always out there in the noonday smog on foot waiting for girls to seduce him.

Jim wasn't real like guys from Texas. All he was was real for L.A.

For L.A., in fact, he was too real.

· · ·

My friend Suzannah, who lived down the street in an overgrown Eden court with stained glass windows and a lily pond down the middle, came from Laguna Beach where she was so adorable that nobody knew she was pregnant when she graduated from Laguna Beach High and nobody knew she had run down to Tijuana to one of the clinics with her sister afterwards, when they wondered where she was at the graduation party. She began going to UCLA the next semester, where she was so wholesome and enthusiastic and sweet
that she was captured by a spy from Rogers and Cowan, the P.R. firm in Beverly Hills that handled movie stars mostly, and given a job making three hundred dollars a week taking the Rolling Stones on tour throughout America all by herself—when she was nineteen.

(“Thrown to the wolves,” she called it.)

Suzannah tried to make herself look older by dressing in beige and having her hair streaked silver and gold, but with her platinum pink toenails, she always reminded me more of the girl friend of a retired gangster. And with me in my blue and black chintz embroidered twenties pajamas and my blond hair rinsed orange by henna, the two of us together struck most people as a coincidence, when in truth we were almost inseparable, at least when we went off to the Sunset Strip at night.

During the daytime, Suzannah was at work and I too would wake up and do things all day, like work too. In between running around with stranded friends, all I did all day was develop pictures, print prints, run back and forth to art directors, drag every single person I ever met around L.A. with me so they wouldn't feel bereft—especially strangers from Texas and New York (since people from London, France, and Italy seemed to expect L.A. to be exactly like it was), taking them downtown and to Pasadena and to the beach and to all my favorite friends' houses and introducing everybody I knew to everybody else so they wouldn't feel catatonic—and so my older L.A. friends wouldn't stagnate up in their Laurel Canyon peace and quiet (none of
my
friends
ever
had much peace and quiet). I would throw parties at the drop of a hat when I made enough money to move to the Spanish duplex down the street (which when the people who rented it to me wanted to know how come a single girl would want it, since it was a two-bedroom, I had to explain it was because I needed the space for “my work”—although the next thing they knew, I had a party for sixty
people in jeans, and limos and falling-apart hearses were parked and double-parked up and down the whole street). I refused to have parties I didn't cook for since from my own experience I'd found that no matter how wonderful a party was, if the food seemed rented—catered chili or lasagna—the party made a hollow impression; whereas if the food was totally unexpected and
great
(like I cooked, but then, I did inherit something from my mother besides her voice—although everybody who got us mixed up on the phone never would have mistaken my parties for hers because my friends had much longer hair), then no matter how awful everything else was, people still left feeling like they'd gotten away with murder.

Of course people at my parties were often convinced landing-in-paradise was for hippies or “peace and love” victims so whatever I did to the food, it had to be all over with after one little taste. I roasted two entire turkeys and made corn-bread stuffing drenched in Grand Marnier with sausages, oysters, chestnuts, and apricots. After they “just tasted” one bite of my stuffing, it was too late of course and if they wanted to feel hollow after that, they'd obviously have to wait a few days. Fortunately food I had anything to do with was always like knockout drops—only instead of you passing out, all anybody did was pass
up
into divine gluttony.

Divine gluttony of course was out of fashion. In fact, by the time my two turkeys made their mark it was 1968 and gluttony had become extinct everywhere in the known world where trying to be skinny like the Beatles, or really skinny like George Harrison, had left the civilized world between thirteen and thirty on a food-free vacation. Some friends preferred to think my ulterior motive behind making dolmas for two days was a trick to make them feel good.

“You're always trying to make people feel at ease!” one of my uncomplicated men friends argued—but men were always accusing me of having fun.

But most people if you asked me always were warning me not to have fun for my own good and were curious to see what became of me if I refused to stop believing some of my friends would turn out to be quite so wonderful once I was in the gutter with a crust of bread.

“My friends will always be utterly fabulous,” I'd say, totally convinced that except for this one problem my friends had about how rotten they were going to be—or at least how rotten everybody else I raved about (like I raved about them of course to everyone else) was just one more person I befriended for all the wrong reasons and not really like them at all.