L.A.WOMAN (3 page)

Mountain climbing—in those days, all you had to do in Hollywood was go outside to go mountain climbing—was
Lola's idea of where to take boyfriends and get pregnant and by the time she was nineteen she'd had three gold medals for violin state champion and four abortions, her life having finally, I suppose, proven that you can't go around being an L.A. woman and expect society not to notice when your bowing begins to sound a little off—not screechy, naturally but, well, she simply wasn't gold medal material finally, and they gave her a silver one, second prize. My father got the gold one. Even though Lola insists that my father's tone was then and always has been enough to make you leave the room.

“Mort,” she says to my father, the minute he tries to play anything in front of her for as long as I can remember, “for God's sake! Not more Bach!”

And he looks around like a cat does when it pretends it wasn't doing what it just did that you caught it at, and was really licking its foot, or wondering if it were going to rain.

Lola and my father never saw anything in each other. My father would never have liked any woman crazier than my mother. And as for Lola—looking at a particularly outstanding old photograph of her standing beside this six-foot-tall extra who looked like a Hindu (as he was billed in his mystic-prince capacity for those who wanted a “reading”), both Lola and he wearing this rattan shadow falling across what would have otherwise shown them to be as naked as you thought—Mort was simply too square.

From the beginning, from the time she was standing outside that mountain cabin and she was wearing her Cleopatra haircut which she wore all her life, turning it oranger and oranger with henna as time went on until today Colette would have tripped if she saw her, Lola's preferences weren't socially bogged down. And a trust fund kept her from letting what she wanted get in the way of wolves at the door, for wolves never threatened her door and she never had to turn to the idea of respectability just to tide herself over for a decade or two until she could figure out how to
indulge her flagrant tastes for the out-of-the-question. Or for men who, English mothers have always told their daughters, simply “won't do.”

Even she, Lola's mother, didn't seem to get overburdened by the problem of men who “didn't do,” once her only husband's brisk demise allowed her to pack up and leave for L.A.

“Nobody ever knew why Hein was such a rebel,” Lola said. “The family wanted her to take the three of us home to Berlin and be brought up with the better things. Minneapolis, anything in America, was Greek to them. And when she came out West, they sent this friend of the family, this doctor called Frederik, to marry her and take her back.”

A photograph of Lola's mother, Hein, looking like a battle-ax from the Queen Victoria understanding of the word, dressed in a Red Cross Volunteer Aide's outfit with some kinds of medals attached to her jacket, which meant she was a general or something gruesome like that, her hair hidden behind a nurse's nun-type headdress, her overbearing bosom completely making Lola's and mine both pretty much as hers was, except that we weren't battle-axes, forcing your eyes to look elsewhere from obviousness.

Beside her stood Frederik, a delicate Berliner Jewish intellectual who found himself spending the rest of his life in the Biltmore Hotel in downtown L.A. (for the first few years) and then, in a house nearer Hein in Hollywood, wooing her as best he could into whatever it was they did.

“They used to give musicales,” Lola told me. “They'd invite the whole Berliner community over on Sundays and she would play the cello and he would play the oboe—”

“The oboe!” I cried.

“That's right.” Lola shook her head.

(As anyone with a knowledge of orchestra instruments knows, playing the oboe for longer than two years makes you go insane.)

One time the musicale was a special fundraiser—though since Lola was nineteen at the time and it was 1930, what the worthy cause would have been even Lola can't remember (usually it was Flanders Field-type orphans her mother leaned toward). This particular night Lola had to get all dressed up in a taffeta and net powder-blue formal which came down to her feet and stockings, a garter belt, the works.

“And I was to play Mendelssohn's violin concerto—my first really Berlin debut,” Lola remembered. “Only even though I could play it fine in public in front of judges—playing in front of all those women, they all looked like her, you know, Hein—and all those men who looked like Frederik, so sensitive and delicate—I just stood there. I couldn't remember one note. And they just sat there, politely. And I just stood there. God.”

“How long did you stand there?”

“Five minutes,” she sighed.

“Oh, Lola, come on, not five whole minutes. Not five! They wouldn't let you just stand up there for five whole minutes and not play a note.”

“My friend timed it,” Lola said. “She began looking at the clock at eight-fifteen and watched me run out of there—I left the fiddle on the stage—at eight-twenty. Precisely. And we've always been very precise.”

Lola ran down the street to where her current boyfriend lived in a rooming house, rattling his window and insisting that he meet her at the corner. The “corner” was right at Beechwood and Franklin, which, today, is two blocks from where I grew up and is three blocks from where my father and mother's latest home is. (That particular neighborhood in Hollywood has always been so hard to shake that when my parents sold their house—the one I grew up in—and moved to Europe, they finally couldn't take it anymore; they missed too many things about L.A. that Rome and Paris and
Heidelberg just don't offer—they missed winters you could gloss over, I think, mainly; they got one just like it a few blocks away. It was larger than the one I grew up in but otherwise just like it, so whenever I go home things don't seem to have shrunk, like other people's houses do when they return, or like my grammar school seemed to when I wandered through it once as an adult. Returning to L.A. my parents couldn't think of the city as anyplace other than that part of Hollywood, near that corner of Beechwood and Franklin.)

The guy, whose name Lola thinks was Ted Kovokovitch (a Yugoslavian in California to plant grapes), met her within seconds.

“And there, right at that corner—you know?—I pulled up that damn taffeta and net skirt, pulled down those awful cotton drawers she always had us wear—and we—”

“You
didn't!”
I cried.

“Yes. Twice.”

“But there's a street lamp!” I said.

“Is there?” Lola asked, frowning a moment. “There wasn't one then. All we had to worry about then was the Dinky.”

“The what?”

“The Dinky,” Lola said. “That little railroad train they used to have going up Canyon Drive. Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton—all those western pictures they made up at the end?—they'd carry the stars and all the extras right past Hein's front window. It was the most amazing thing, looking out through all that Queen Victoria massive power of our living room—the drapes alone, my God, they must have weighed twenty pounds of velvet and lining and interlining, each panel—through the torrey pines that grew in our front yard, and there, going past on this tiny little car, not anywhere as big as a streetcar, that's what they called it, the Dinky, would be this face—this face everyone in America knew. Everyone, that is, except mother. Or any of her
friends. But of course Mother wouldn't even allow the servants to go to the movies, she thought them so immoral. And I have no idea where she thought we lived.”

“So the Dinky was all you were afraid of?” I asked.

“All
he
was afraid of, you mean,” Lola insisted, “I was an animal.”

“Well,” I said, “I was
worse
than an animal.”

“I beg your pardon?” she asked, the summer I was seventeen.

“Well, remember that dog Tango we used to have when I was ten or eleven?” I asked. She nodded her head. “Well, Tango and I began having an affair on the bathroom floor, sort of—not that he deflowered me or anything, I mean I did have some sense of the fitness of things, but you know I did let that Tango lick me every time I could lock us in the bathroom and lie down. The tiles were so mint green, Mother had just had it done. Anyway, I had to give him away.”

“Don't tell me your poor mother found out?” Lola cried.

“No, it was worse,” I said, “it was worse. You see, he began waiting for me to come home from school or the beach—he'd wait there by the window day and night. I was afraid they'd get suspicious. The poor thing was obviously in love with me. And I could see that—well, I had to give him away. That summer we were up in Lake Arrowhead I did it because we were far away.”

“The poor thing,” Lola sighed, “he loved you.”

“See,” I said, “so I was
worse
than an animal.”

Lola looked at me for a moment and turned away.

“You're sure you aren't just trying to be polite?”

“Me?” I cried.

“That little dog with one blue eye and one brown eye?” she asked. “Why your poor mother!”

“So what else did you do?” I asked, expectantly, longing for anything else she could tell me about being an animal.

“Oh,” she said, “there was the time there I was, in the Model T, stopped at a light on Hollywood Boulevard.” When suddenly, she was “. . . so overcome, I just
had
to . . .” and she licked her fingers right then and there, shooting her hand up her skirt before the light turned green.

“When I was done, and I was putting it into first gear, just in the very nick of time,” she laughed, “I looked up and saw all the people from the streetcar next to me, all watching—they'd seen everything.” She laughed now over it all, not turning scarlet with shame in the least which is what I still do whenever things I did like an animal catch up with me—or at least what I did when I imagined no one was looking, finding out I was wrong when it was too late. But I'll probably always be turning scarlet whereas I don't think Lola ever did, even when she looked up and saw the whole streetcar full of faces looking straight down into her lap.

· · ·

In my day growing up in Southern California meant you didn't grow up, at least not like girls did elsewhere. Having not grown up myself, like Lola, I know what it was exactly—what it is—to be a woman-looking person in your twenties with none of the trials and tribulations bogging down your whole life, driving you from one predictable crisis of adult life to the next until it's too late. I, like Lola, was unable to take adult life seriously in my twenties at all and in fact sometimes I wonder, when I look at adult life even now, how on earth I got myself anywhere past my teens.

Every time the school counselor's office called me down and wanted to know why a girl with my grades wasn't planning on going “on” (i.e., to UCLA), I felt like oatmeal from head to toe.

The idea of doing anything once I got out of the twelfth grade—provided I could even get out since my spelling was impervious to tradition—besides just lying on the beach seemed too much to ask.

“Mother,” I once asked, “you don't want me to
become
anything, do you?”

“Only what you really want to be,” she said.

“But what if I don't really want to be anything?” I asked.

“I'm sure everything will be just fine,” she smiled.

But of course in those days, the early sixties, girls could still get away with “getting married and settling down with some lovely young man,” and the school counselor didn't drive me as crazy as she probably would have later. Since looking at Sheena sitting in an office in the Administration Building at Hollywood High, it didn't take a trained L.A. city school expert to realize all I cared about anyway was fun and men and trouble.

Of course there was one thing I wanted to do when I grew up, which I had known all along, and that was to invite people over and have dinner, like my mother.

The thing about L.A. is that there really was no place to sit down. Well, maybe the Stravinskys and people like that had houses where people could come over but most of the people they invited outside of my parents and me all had accents too. It seemed a shame to me that there was no one in all of L.A. who could speak without an accent and be invited over for dinner, and I just knew that there were plenty of people without accents who'd love to come over for dinner and who probably didn't even know what it was like to sit down since they'd spent their lives in L.A. and therefore had no idea how interesting they were.

Already I knew that my best friend in high school—Franny—could talk a perfect blue streak and be every bit as gripping as the people my grandmother always said were brilliant.

And anyway, I didn't necessarily want brilliant people coming over to sit down. I more wanted people who were more or less peculiar, like artists or writers or people Franny
and I met hanging around Schwab's who spent their life at Santa Anita going to the races (of course they had accents like people in
Guys and Dolls
which was fine with me). And I wanted people like my friend Ollie from junior high who'd been kicked out of Virgil, L.A.'s toughest
pachuco
high school at that time, and dumped on us at Le Conte where suddenly we had this Japanese girl, Ollie, in the tightest skirt anyone had ever seen, with a razor blade in her hairdo, who sat in the back of Algebra calling it “obnoxious” and getting called down to the principal's office for disturbing the peace. All the people I'd ever met so far in my life who'd struck me as the least bit out-of-the-way I'd managed to keep track of, even when Ollie had been sent to Betsy Ross—the local reform school—and even when she got kicked out of there at the age of sixteen and married a car thief I still always knew where she was. And I wanted all my L.A. people one day to be invited into a large crumbling L.A. mansion (exactly like Franny's which was my dream of a crumbling mansion from the moment she first showed it to me) to eat burritos and drink Rainier Ale and all meet my parents.