L.A.WOMAN (5 page)

She was engrossed in a serial called
The Girl in the Blue Dress
which the Beaumont paper was running every day. It was about a girl who'd gone to Hollywood from a small town,
determined to become an actress and planning to make herself noticeable by wearing only one color, blue. And every day she waited outside the studio for someone to choose her, to notice her, but they never did. Until finally, she was forced to leave her lodgings and wound up sharing a chaste arrangement with a young man who'd also come to Hollywood to make good and whose tiny Hollywood bungalow he let her share, without the slightest trace of anything vulgar. The platonic nature of their arrangement was a simple fact. That the two of them could live in a place where living together at all was possible struck Eugenia as perfect—a place where no small town restrictions, no gossip, could befoul their fun.

She'd tried to survive a year of life by herself in New Orleans where she had lived as a secretary, working in an office. But the office she worked in went broke and the jobs she tried to find were all hopeless. So she'd returned to Sour Lake and was still in it.

Perhaps she was too scared to leave or too loyal to her mother or just didn't know where to go anyway, but once she began
The Girl in the Blue Dress
she found out where to go—Hollywood. Hollywood where you could do whatever you liked. And nobody noticed.

She had her savings and with the help of a Catholic priest from Chicago who was eager to see that anyone who wanted to leave Texas got out even if he couldn't, she even was given a ride—he knew someone driving there who would take her, saving her train fare.

She arrived in Hollywood in 1933 and met Billie, a girl the priest knew who was about her age and also there from the South—only Billie was from Beaumont, a place that was the height of sophistication compared to Sour Lake. Except to Billie, who was one of those people just born knowing they've got to get out of Texas the quickest they can. And since she was so beautiful, Hollywood was obviously her
only true home. Hollywood, she felt, was where she belonged.

She felt this even in Hollywood itself where, a year before, she'd arrived and gotten a job as a waitress and a boyfriend who was a waiter in the Coconut Grove. Her boyfriend, like all the waiters in the Coconut Grove, was Italian. He'd begun being a waiter in Switzerland and at the finest hotels he'd apprenticed since he was twelve. By the time he was twenty he was a consummate waiter and his friend, Pietro, also an Italian, was also fully trained. Deciding to come to America—to Hollywood—instead of going to Venice where the hotels needed fully trained Italians from Swiss hotel dining rooms, they arrived first in Canada and then, crossing the border by night, to America, entering the United States illegally and proceeding to Hollywood at once.

Perhaps Rudolph Valentino had been their inspiration. After all, Valentino had been only a poor boy from Italy too. To poor boys from Italy like Pietro and Alphonso, Billie's boyfriend, it almost seemed foolish
not
to go to Hollywood.

Which was why places like the Coconut Grove managed to hire such a finely trained staff—and why a place like Los Angeles, which would hardly seem like the sort of place one would expect to find service so magnificently cosmopolitan, wound up having the kinds of waiters who eventually became maître d's at the world's finest restaurants. New York, in fact, is especially full of maître d's who began in the Coconut Grove as waiters, Italians from Switzerland via Canada by moonlight.

Looking like a hick in her blue dress, Eugenia Crawley carried her suitcase to Billie's front porch and knocked. But she was so shy, adorable, and sweet that Pietro, Alphonso's friend and fellow waiter, fell in love with her at once, in spite of her blue dress.

Hardly giving Eugenia a chance to look for a job, Pietro insisted that Eugenia marry him and not get a job, be his
wife instead. She didn't know what to do but say yes. Right off she'd noticed how much like Valentino Pietro looked. His nose was almost exactly identical.

“Yes,” she said.

And when they took a weekend off for their honeymoon and went to Laguna, she returned to Hollywood with her hair a new way and a glow of tan and a new dress—also blue—a dress which he chose for her though, which transformed her into a shy beauty and not a pretty hick at all.

· · ·

In the dance troupe Lola's best friend was the Femme Fatale of the century named Estelle Varez, who wasn't pretty or beautiful or even awake most of the time but really only alive the eight times she managed to get married and divorced. The alimony rolled in.

By the time I met Estelle Varez she was fifty years old and she'd grown as heavy and motionless as the Sphinx. But occasionally she would make up her mind that it was not too much trouble to move. Perhaps consistency demanded that if everything people do was too much trouble, then she had to include doing nothing as too much trouble as well and go make tea. That moment when she rose from her chaise was all I needed to see to know dancing must have rolled off her so obviously that if she even attempted to leap like Goldie the world would end from too broad a gesture. Like that moment with those heaviest boa constrictors when they break out of stony motionless hours or days, suddenly contracting and expanding, making a cataclysmic shambles of their old diamond-shaped skin designs and making mincemeat out of the Physical Properties and Laws of Gravity devised by grave and serious men who insist that everything is dying to fall, to succumb to the earth's pull.

One time, Shelly, one of my deadly earnest girl friends, trying to determine if Estelle was a satisfactory woman up on current events and what was the latest happening to date, found that not only didn't Estelle shop, know about austere
films, understand that Hellenic was entirely different and better than Hellenistic styles of art, realize the importance of drugs in the treatment of schizophrenia or the whole new field of psychopharmacology opening up, but after a while my friend finally turned cold when it turned out that Estelle hadn't read
Giovanni's Room.

“Read?” Estelle laughed. “Why should I bother with such foolishness?”

“You don't read?” Shelly gasped.

“Certainly not,” Estelle replied, peeling a grape in her chaise with her long Lincoln Continental Maroon polished fingernails.

“But books are—” Shelly cried, terror impaling her face into Hellenistic horror rather than classical Greek peaceful beauty like Estelle's. “—books are necessary!”

“Necessary? What on earth for?”

“You have to read,” Shelly cried, her face stolid as a sleeping boa, “or you can't learn things.”

“Why should
I
be expected to
do
anything. Learn things? Read? I think it's very silly of you young people these days to expect people—me—to
do
anything.
Very
silly. And I must say,” she must have had to add, “very boring and very tiresome of you—those your age I mean—doing all that. Doing anything is really so bad, but you—your generation—you do
everything.
It must stop.”

“I don't believe you,” Shelly now laughed, relieved.

“But it's true,” Estelle said, her thumb impaled in a grape which was blacker than her nail polish, thank heavens. If it were green, Shelly might have never gotten out alive. “All of you doing what you'll do. Not only is it silly, boring, and tiresome—it's dangerous, of course, it's bad and dangerous because you don't know
what
you're doing. But dangerous, bad . . . these things are details. Details give women wrinkles. I'm over fifty and I don't have one line on my face. Details! Like good and bad!”

“You're so funny,” Shelly decided, consoled that this nice
old lady was only trying to be wicked and witty but didn't know how.

“No I'm not,” Estelle replied. Her face settled into a hitman's closed mask. Not a wrinkle anywhere.

“If I don't go to UCLA I might come up to Berkeley this fall. I'll call you, okay? And come over like this to see you again. . . . I like the older generation you know?”

“How on earth can a grown woman spend the fall in a place like Berkeley?” Estelle demanded of me.

“School,” I said. “You know, UC Berkeley? School?”

“Oh, but all fall?” Estelle asked.

“Oh I'm going to be a lawyer one day,” Shelly smiled. “And help those more unfortunate than myself.”

“And who might that be?” Estelle asked.

“Why the poor,” Shelly said, dripping brimfuls of her usual Gamma good intentions—the only sorority at Hollywood High that never got laid. “We've got to help.” Shelly went on, “I mean, we've got to
do
something.”

“Darling,” Estelle turned to me and said, “I'm terribly sorry but it's just too much trouble for me to get up. And show you out. Can you show yourselves out?”

“Shelly, we're going,” I told her.

“Now?” She was in the middle of her first sip of tea and her first cookie.

“Now!”
I said. “Hurry up.”

“That's a good girl,” Estelle called out to me as I left, “and slam the door tight, sweetheart. Lock it!”

· · ·

Fortunately Lola and Estelle formed a friendship originally based on the obvious premise that mascara—Maybel-line black cake mascara you spit into and brushed onto your eyelashes with a caked little brush which fit into the very same little red container—that mascara was the meaning of life. Since they were really the only two in Teretsky's troupe who understood this simple reality, their friendship
survived Lola's politics and Estelle's lack of them. And since Lola's radicalism was for The Cause—The Cause being the overthrowing of oppressors known as pigs by the splinter groups, groups Lola and Luther, her black second husband, the present one, were not in now. They were now outsiders from everything because Luther hoped to unite them and attempted to bridge differences and turn splinter groups from hating each other into one large mass of leftists packing clout—Luther was accused of being a tool of the pigs and The Man and got his ceiling filled with bullet holes at lunch. But Lola nevertheless believed the radical ideal that anyone not overthrowing the oppressors was an oppressor by default. And that people who did nothing were going to be sorry after the revolution.

Yet even today I bet Lola's and Estelle's blackened eyelashes and hideous caked little eyelash brushes never ever once rinsed off—they just built until finally, in the end, they were tossed into the trash, forgotten, while a new cake of Maybelline began life, spit and eyelashes were caked blackly, the way Lola and Estelle made sure they were. For Lola and Estelle at seventy still weren't about to settle for one of those new eyelash wands that claimed to make your eyelashes separate and natural and not clotted into bunches and totally unnatural, old-fashioned, and not really nice. But Lola and Estelle at seventy still knew that not really nice, unnaturally blackened eyelashes were good enough for Theda Bara and certainly good enough to steal other women's husbands right out from under them. Other women who didn't wear black mascara and who were confident that the natural look that had blasted its way into being all the rage and forced old-fashioned lipsticks in red and purple to lose their power. And natural flesh tones were unequal to the power they'd gotten from being new. Like natural eyelashes and women who allowed their hair to just go gray without doing something, anything—depending on the
natural look to keep their beds filled with men—were blaming men for everything. When Lola's and Estelle's beds were nice and warm. Because their eyelashes were risqué and not nice, just the way men liked them.

Knowledge as primal as Lola's and Estelle's could, I think, have bridged the gap—the deepening gap crevassing between them and all their differences—on the sheer force of the way things really are, which was never ever about men liking gray hair or nature.

· · ·

It must have been the day I was in San Francisco to see Lola when the woman downstairs with two children who was thirty-two years old came over to tell Lola she'd joined a women's group.

“How sickening,” Lola volunteered, looking up from the photo album we were always looking through.

“But we are oppressed,” the girl named Joanne said, full of oppressed rage.

“How awful,” Lola went on.

“And in our group we are going to learn to have an orgasm. To learn about our own bodies,” Joanne marched on further. “To free ourselves from our oppressors.”

“That's just awful.” Lola's widening eyes comprehended what she'd just heard. “You mean you have never had an orgasm, you're going to a women's group to learn? All of you? On the floor? Like the Hollywood School for Girls.”

“Where's that? Hollywood? Well, I went to a Catholic school with nuns and we never even took our clothes all off to bathe. . . . So! It's time to free ourselves from our oppressors. Today was my first group consciousness-raising session.”

“Where's Dale?” Lola asked. Joanne's husband was Dale.

“Oh,” Joanne said, “he left. He left when he found out I was going to tell people I had never come. He got mad. He said it was a reflection on him. He said if after seven years of
marriage I still couldn't come, what was the difference? So he's gone. Now tell me who's the sickening one?”

“You're both just awful,” Lola replied instantly. “Just terribly terribly awful. And”—she began to laugh her he-he laugh—“you mean you and a bunch of grown women are just going to lay around and—”

“If you're laughing at me,” Joanne said, “you're one of them.”

And since Lola couldn't stop laughing even though it meant being one of them, I have the feeling that it must have been that day when learning all of a sudden a new oppressed class had definitely emerged from the masses heretofore unidentified and lacking definition—and it was her. Only she refused to remove her mascara
or
let her hair go gray
or
take off her pancake makeup
or
let people who had only just gotten around to having orgasms tell her that she didn't know about men and women. When it was the only thing she had ever known that hadn't oppressed her—outside of Sam—one bit. Not one.