L.A.WOMAN (2 page)

“He's a doll,” Lola said.

“Of course,” I admitted, “it is touched up. The studio didn't like his nose like it was. But otherwise he's really this way.”

Lola pulled her reading glasses out of her purse beside the couch and scrutinized Claude's face with more objective detachment. I waited, not breathing. Of course, Claude's black wavy hair from being French wouldn't go against him. They all had black wavy hair back in those days, back when they were dancing and touring with Teretsky, marrying the wrong people. All the wrong people marrying each other had black wavy hair and the absolutely impossible men had the same kind of grin beaming ravenously out of Claude's autographed eight-by-ten glossy. So surely Lola would save me and stay while I perilously endangered my future, wrecked the vacation, and threw away the possibility to travel someplace halfway decent and see a Real City—New York—finally, which all my life I'd been told I had to do. For a bloodthirsty smile like Claude's, combined with how black his wavy hair was, threw the whole fucking East Coast into shadow. For compared with the trouble I could be in in Hollywood over the next month, all the evil companions I might fall in with in New York just paled. In fact that summer, if I'd been asked, everything paled by comparison to me then when I thought of going anyplace outside L.A. Just bothering to go someplace other than Santa Monica was incomprehensible when I could just wake up every morning at dawn, yank on my bathing suit still on the floor from the night before when I'd yanked it off, hurry down to Hollywood and Gower to catch the 91S bus down Hollywood Boulevard and then Santa Monica Boulevard to Beverly Hills and transfer to the 83 going straight out to the beach
untilfinally there I'd be, at 8:00
A.M
. or so, able to feel the cool sand get warm as the morning sun glazed over the tops of the palm trees up on the palisades while waves of the ocean crashed down day after day so anyone could throw himself into the tides and bodysurf throughout eternity.

“Your poor mother,” Lola sighed, resigned.

“She said I had no one to stay with,” I said, determined. “She
has
to let me. If you're here, she
has
to.”

“Well,” Lola said, “it couldn't hurt Luther to know I can stay away for a month. But you tell your mother. It has to be okay with her, you know? Gee, I never imagined I'd be staying here with you a whole month—and in the same neighborhood as me when I was growing up. You know, our old house isn't far from here.”

“Oh, Lola, thank God you've come,” I cried, although I'd known something had to save me—of course, I never would have dreamed someone as good as Lola, my parents' only halfway-up-to-date friend from the olden days, would be part of the deal.

I mean in those days, as far as I was concerned, all the Trotskyites and Stalinists and Republicans and Democrats and anyone else wearing a suit on the cover of
Time
magazine because of politics could go jump in a lake, and yet somehow, in the very midst of it all, there stood Lola. Picketing. Great legs, a figure which, when I was seventeen, I watched men drive into telephone poles over, a bizarre use of earrings, an altogether Cleopatra-girl slink to every move in her whole body, a demonically objective attitude about sizing things up and speaking her findings with a voice touched with nothing more than a glow of detached amusement over details she'd recount, laying to waste listeners, speechless when she told them, “Oh, didn't you know, she and her father bathe together. How old do you think she is? Thirty-seven. The mother, you know, she died when the girl was only a child. No one, I guess, wanted to tell him—or her—I mean
bathing!
Together. Or am I too old-fashioned?”

But of course she had never been old-fashioned enough to most of the people my father knew when political criteria were his pride and joy, although oddly enough in the end she was the only one we ever really wanted to see after all. Because old-fashioned she never became.

A
ND BY THE TIME
I saw her the summer I was forty she still really hadn't seemed to become old. There she was—Lola—in this slinky turtleneck paisley jersey dress at seventy-two, leaving cars crashed into loud accidents commemorating her visits. Imagining how she once must have exploded and hissed and crushed through piles of men back when she was twenty-three or seventeen isn't that difficult. Seen from behind, Lola still makes seventeen seem possible. It's just when she turns around and speaks German like her mother that you can guess she's nearly fifty and still be only twenty years off. From behind, you could make a mistake of half a century. The lynxy little pout in her walk, the elbows so trimly neatened at her sides, the self-consciousness in her feet like a girl unused to such high heels yet—from behind she could easily be mistaken for a teenager out for danger, any kind of danger she can find. Lola from behind looks very capable of stirring up trouble, trouble like nobody ever hoped to see.

Trouble was Lola's middle essence.

It kept her back straight and her chin high and her expectations prepared for everything, for fathers and daughters who were thirty-seven no matter what they did in bathtubs.

At least everything except Sam.

Of course so far the worst person in Lola's milieu was Lola herself and it seemed to her, perhaps, that she had to do all the heartbreaks in town and invent everything herself.

Whereas once she met Sam Glanzrock, she could relax.

Someone who didn't even try and hide his ravenous
appetites by smiling, not a single smile did he smile for a camera in all those years, not even so much as a bloodthirsty veiled transparent trick smile.

All that remains of same from Lola's photographs of those days is a weird suspicion. Not anything you would know was wrong.

It was just that Sam's hair was light brown, curling light brown hair.

He hadn't even bothered to hide under black wavy hair like in those days they all had. That's how much trouble Sam was.

· · ·

(But I would know by the summer I was twenty-three when I met Jim what it was like having to be the one who breaks hearts, who causes trouble, who invents everything and is the worst, myself—but then anyone who saw Jim that night would have realized that I was looking for trouble myself.

“Let's go,” I said, “fast.”

“Uhhhhhh . . . where?”

“To my place,
now
—quickly, let's go now.” Of course, anyone who saw me that night and had taken one look at Jim would have known I was safely aboard a raft heading over Niagara Falls. That night I was twenty-three and a daughter of Hollywood, alive with groupie fervor, wanting to fuck my way through rock'n'roll and drink tequila and take uppers and downers, keeping joints rolled and lit, a regular customer at the clap clinic, a groupie prowling the Sunset Strip, prowling the nights of summer, trying to find someone who promised I should, if I didn't stay away, only run into trouble, endangering my life.)

“How beautiful,” Lola remarked, dragging out the vowels in beauty so that it lingered in my ears. “How damn well fucking beautiful this man's face is. And what a man, too. Isn't that marvelous how he still is a man? A man with that
hair and a face—and so beautiful—but there's no doubt in my mind that he's heterosexual, not one.”

We stood looking at his photograph like we were always looking at photographs when I visited Lola in San Francisco, and he gazed back—a gaze that meant nothing but trouble. And Jim gazed back at us—only by then I was thirty and he was dead.

“Didn't he . . . ?” she asked.

“In Paris,” I said. “Too.”

“How interesting,” she said pleasantly, turning to a photograph of me when I was ten. “Oh, look,” she cried, “you, when you were still a virgin. To think, I actually knew you when you were seventeen. What was the name of your boyfriend then?”

“Claude,” I said, proud I remembered.

“Y
OUR POOR MOTHER
,” Lola would remark like a lament throughout the month she stayed with me.

Her voice trying to sound shocked but managing only to well up with detached amazement and then vaporize into a mist of nostalgia from the days when Rudolph Valentino's flaring nostrils in
The Sheik,
when the flashcard said “Must I be valet as well as lover?” were enough to make her come.

“Every time he said that to her, his nostrils would catch—and I would have to go relieve myself. Both physically and manually . . . I was so involved with that man.”

So it was a lot better than whatever was in New Jersey. And I was a virgin when my parents returned, more or less, but not by the next weekend.

· · ·

“Spit,” Ophelia concluded, “that's the whole trick to giving head. Just spit.” She had already showed me how to
keep the grip light enough to keep the outer skin moving over the inner part. And she'd showed me how to do it so I didn't have to count on my mouth except for spit . . . and by Saturday afternoon Claude said it worked.

“That's fantastic!” he said.

“Oh, it's just spit,” I said.

“No,” he said, “no really, that is fan-fucking-tastic!”

“Thank you,” I said.

Spit was my specialty. Spit I could understand. Spit was so easy.

A
T THE AGE OF FIVE
Lola was brought by her family to California, along with the German silverware, the mahogany tables, the twenty-four dining room chairs, the lace tablecloths, the candelabra, the servants, from the home with a clothes hamper chute where when the cloth used for Kotex in those days was soiled, you just lightly tossed it down the little wall door and one week later it was returned to you nice and clean and neatly folded by some woman who came once a week to launder, a woman nobody ever saw—or at least Lola never even remembered. Until she ran away from home at the age of twenty-six to join a Martha Grahamtype traveling modern dance troupe and became radicalized into a Trotskyite, she lived in that house with that furniture and for a long time, though she refused to speak that Berliner German they spoke at home to keep the tone up and the servants in Mars where they belonged in 1911.

It wasn't as though a lot of German silverware and candelabra weren't already out in Southern California by the time Hein Vogel, Lola's westward-destined mother—one of those Jews too elegant to have left before any pogroms squeezed her out like my grandmother's exit from Kiev—arrived, it was just that most of it was in Pasadena on North Orange
Grove Drive. The mansions in Pasadena even today are perfect for trainloads of European treasures brought from the Midwestern fortunes—the Bambols, the Wrigleys—coming to California for “the climate.” Because if you were from the Midwest, and you wanted to breathe air that wasn't all taken up by the fortunes breathing in the Newport Beach-style mansions, Henry James tablecloths, and already organized society which wasn't going to let anyone in until endless formalities transpired, then “the climate” of California, the orange groves, the purple mountains' actual visible majesty—the San Gabriel Mountains there, brightly purple—was a good place for your servants to polish your teapots.

Perhaps Lola's German Midwestern fortune made from stockings was refused in Pasadena because it was Jewish and that's why it all had to come to Hollywood and that's why Lola was raised in the middle of Hollywood during the twenties with Hollywood Boulevard four blocks away; the Hollywood School for Girls, the private school she attended; Jean Harlow sitting next to her in class, Jackie Coogan, the only boy and the school mascot, while at home she was strictly bound to a classic Germany, a Germany of violin practice two hours a day, of culture, of table manners that got Bobby Hall—one of those Panthers of the sixties whom she traveled with when she married Luther, her black second husband—so mad he shot a hole through her dining room ceiling. I mean Lola eating ribs with a knife and fork was just too much for him. But Lola, who was sixty by then, could never have picked something up with her fingers—after all her mother, then ninety-four, was still alive even if it was in Honolulu (that woman really meant West) and even though Lola was now officially into The Movement with a vengeance, she just wasn't about to not use silverware.

Of course it was nothing to be too much for the Black Panther Party when you're sixty if you've been too much for the Hollywood School for Girls when you were fifteen.
She'd go to school there in 1926 dressed in her navy blue middy outfit and wait till school let out to change into a black skirt slit up to her thigh and a lot of blood-red lipstick smashed on the front of her face, so she could go out onto Hollywood Boulevard and try and pick up guys, trying to look older than a schoolgirl yet still unable to quite look old enough by then. Even though the Hollywood School for Girls believed the worst, Lola dropped out before she could graduate so as not to spread sin around the virgins in her class. L.A. It was impossible for her strict German upbringing to stop Lola from being too much. For L.A. women became L.A. women if they got there young enough, no matter what they had been born into.

When Lola was sixteen, her mother gave Lola a Model T Ford, a reward because Lola won the state violin gold medal—though how Lola focused herself into the discipline it takes to practice a violin during the Hollywood School for Girls is simply paradoxical enough for some L.A. woman like her to prove was possible.

The Model T Ford gave her exactly everything. She could drive down Sunset Boulevard, which in 1927 when she began taking the car to the beach wasn't much of a street at all and still isn't, though at least today it's paved.

Lola became a muscle beach aficionado, the top of four layers of musclemen—the girl with her arms raised in graceful triumph, wearing a horrible black wool bathing suit which did purposefully Bermuda shorts-type things to her gorgeous thighs and crowded her 36DD breasts into squashed-out spongecakes. The neckline was modesty itself and it was necklines like these that were probably responsible for people, the minute they could, turning into Jean Harlow by the thirties and letting the devil take the hindmost.