L.A.WOMAN (6 page)

Maurice Teretsky had a slavish thing about women's feet so overpowering that it was all he could do when he first saw Lola to keep from throwing himself at hers and licking them forever, wrecking her audition.

“Good, very good,” he said professionally, not wrecking her audition, “now you will be one of us.”

“Oh,” Lola said.

“You will come back this afternoon for your first rehearsal. What is your name,
katchka?”

“Vogel,” Lola said, professionally. “Lola Vogel.”

“Ahhh,” he sighed, “and what size are your feet?”

“My feet?” Lola asked.

Goldie, sitting beside Maurice, tensed into an iron bar of requited suspicions. Her stonelike trance and Lola's raised eyebrows asking “My feet?” made him exercise his tremendous
discipline over his reckless urge to lick each of her toes ragged.

“It's her, isn't it?” Goldie demanded.

“You may go,” Maurice politely said now to Lola.

Lola made a slight bow and left the stage.

“I knew it was someone,” Goldie seethed, “I knew it.”

“But my dear child,” Maurice said, “I never saw her before today.”

“I'll die,” Goldie moaned. “Ohhhhhh.”

· · ·

Sitting beside Maurice Teretsky, Lola attempted to breathe lightly and through her mouth. Breathing through her nose when she was around Maurice made her gag, the smell of freshly chewed garlic was so devastating after he ate his breakfast. Trying to offer him Dentyne didn't work because he believed chewing gum was an American abomination, but a week after Lola's induction into the troupe when Maurice had had time to pick a fatal fight with Goldie and clear the decks for someone new, he decided that Lola chewing gum was “charming.”

“Except when you are on stage,” he explained. “And those are the only two faults in your performance.”

“You want me to wear a bra?” Lola asked.

“You must, my dear,” Maurice said, “you must.”

“But it's so . . . artificial.”

“Perhaps,” Maurice sighed, “but so is art. And we are artists. We must accept these things.”

“I guess.” Lola sighed, learning to breathe with her mouth already.

Ever since Lola supplanted Goldie (unbeknownst to Lola until months after she'd been supplanted by Molly), she had become Maurice's little
katchka
(which, she found out, was Yiddish for goose). Sitting next to him during auditions became one of their shared intimacies.

“I didn't mind so much sleeping with him because at five
P.M
. he drank a glass of parsley juice and thinned out the garlic, but peee yew I'm telling you, during those auditions—in the mornings—the worst!”

If the mornings were hot during some of those September days, Maurice held his auditions outside and the sky was unnecessarily turquoise, not yet toned down by smog. Every morning now that Lola had become a mistress to her father figure, she got up at the crack of dawn and ran up the trail to the top of Mount Hollywood and then back down again trying to break her own record which she timed on her watch. That she had become a dancer had nothing to do with her determination to keep in shape.

That morning when she got to the top of Mount Hollywood she paused for two minutes to watch the way the sun stretched out in the east and made a clear yellow line on the bottom. L.A.'s horizons could be so flattened sometimes due to nothing in the distance but low hills like Mount Hollywood itself.

There is of course no tree, bush, or flower called Hollywood anyplace on earth, and in fact the only two kinds of things which actually grow indigenous to Hollywood at all are either black oaks or brush, a kind of chaparral which, in September as Lola breathed in the smell, smelled only of dryness about to go up in flames. But at least not of garlic.

· · ·

Molly had the kind of plump girlish feet with rose-colored little toes that were enough to turn Maurice Teretsky into a slave of burning desire, and he might have thrown himself at these very feet, thus ruining himself and his artistic aspirations forever in “this town” as Hollywood is called, had not those eyebrows of hers (unplucked) saved him and kept him faithful to Lola's feet for almost three more weeks.

Unlike Goldie, who went to bed and thought about suicide, listening to Billie Holiday sing “Strange Fruit” for six
days and nights (on a 78), when Lola was supplanted she hardly missed him.

“I mean,” she explained, “I had forgotten what a pleasure it was to enjoy one's nose.”

Molly van Horn was from that part of Connecticut where Jews weren't allowed to play golf, but she wasn't Jewish and besides she'd never wanted to do anything but dance like Isadora Duncan and planned to dance with Martha Graham.

But the year before Molly ran away to Los Angeles, she had seen the Teretsky troupe and when Goldie leaped out onto the stage like a flying black bird with red lipstick, Molly had suddenly decided she would go west instead in spite of how nobody in her family had gone further west than Philadelphia since before New Amsterdam changed to New York.

And in spite of Edmund Wilson's reports about how shabby and flimsy and fake it all was.

And in spite of the movies.

Because Molly decided that she needn't pay the slightest attention to L.A. or the movies or any other flimsiness—she was sure she could keep a closed mind and not get corrupted.

She was sure she wasn't ever going to go Hollywood, so she went.

I
N DOWNTOWN
L.A. cafeterias like Clifton's offered all-you-can-eat lunches for a nickel and the Salvation Army had free soup lines for people without nickels at all.

“I was giving your Aunt Goldie breakfast in bed just the way Fraulein did when my sisters and I were little,” Lola told me. “Can you imagine? I had never heard Yiddish before. I had no idea what a Jew was. That's how unconscious I was about 1932.”

“But I thought you were a Jew,” I said.

“I thought so too,” she said.

In Lola's house they were such intellectual German Jews with their Fraulein and servants and love of musicales that they didn't even speak Yiddish and Lola had to learn what
katchka
meant in Teretsky's classes along with all the rest of the things she learned about Jews there also.

In my family I would imagine that my father was a Jew because of his black wavy hair but that me, my sister Bonnie or my mother, Eugenia (the girl in the blue dress, who'd actually converted to Judaism in a strange ceremony at the Hollywood Jewish Men's Club where she had to go into the swimming pool dressed in a sheet before a rabbi, and the sheet, she said, “kept floating up around my shoulders, it was not very modest at all”), were Jews—that was impossible. Here I was a blond girl in a leopard-skin bathing suit ready for action in the worst way, drinking Scotch with Claude till 2:00
A.M
. contemplating my about-to-be-lost virginity, and my sister with her Bardot figure taking after my grandma in Texas with its boyish derriere and girlish breasts which grew so perfectly, we just couldn't be Jewish. Even my sister Bonnie, who knew what Jews were and who listened when my grandfather told her things, even my sister didn't have black wavy hair and therefore could not be Jewish: her hair was straight and brownish blond like mine and would have been all blond if she'd have bleached it, but she was too nice. Being too nice was why she wound up that summer in New Jersey instead of staying home and learning how to give head from Ophelia like me (not, of course, that she
never
learned to give head).

Of course, my sister always knew more about a lot of things, like being Jewish. She knew how to read music with both hands at the piano (rather than get by learning to play the guitar which was what I did). She knew how to sew from a pattern, how to get straight A's, how to go with the most popular kids in school and get herself elected class president
without wearing any makeup or cheapening herself by letting guys feel her up.

But I knew how long to leave peroxide on to keep my hair platinum blond, how to go just to the edge of getting myself pregnant but never quite end up in Tijuana at some abortionist place, how to skip a grade in high school without really doing extra work but simply changing my major so that I had enough credits to graduate half a year early. I knew how to wheedle Lola into staying in Hollywood with me that summer, and I could almost always get the most unconscionable requests of mine granted by some inner instinct for when the time was ripe to ask for the impossible and make it possible in the end after all—at least for me.

· · ·

I have always believed that life is not fair and that I've been too lucky but there's nothing I could do about it except feel guilty so I do—or at least I try.

That's probably why I always felt so guilty about Claude deflowering me, because I had read many reports that doing it the first time was sure to be a grave disaster but the only thing I didn't like about the first time with Claude was doing it on the rug of my parents' living room with my parents (after they came back from New Jersey) upstairs sleeping in the bed—the nice bed and not the floor.

I expected to lose lots of blood like they did in the Middle Ages but instead I just felt that surely nothing the size of Claude's cock was going to fit in my peculiar case no matter what normal people supposedly did, when suddenly I realized that Claude's cock had been all the way up to the hilt and I still wasn't bleeding.

“Is that all?” I asked.

“All?”
Claude cried.

“Never mind,” I said, trying to be polite.

But finally I knew that I was probably one of those girls who just wasn't meant to have a formal deflowering.

When I told my mother (who had been a trusting saint up till then) she whirled around in a spiral and snapped, “You mean you might be pregnant right now?”

But then we went to a Beverly Hills doctor (one of their friends with the Russian accents) who gave me a diaphragm and I was on my way.

In those days, seventeen-year-old blond girls with tits did not run around looking for trouble with their own diaphragms even in Hollywood—or not every day anyway—but there I was, looking to find someone who could make me feel like I wasn't a virgin once and for all.

I just felt some vital suspension of disbelief was absent—love.

Maybe I somehow knew I was lucky even then because with Claude and his beautiful black wavy hair and the gardenias he left beside my nose on the living room floor (that he'd picked up from Kelbo's before taking me home), all I smelled still was the vicious flower of virginity in the night—and when next I noticed gardenias the night I met Jim, I knew that I finally could never know anything about virginity again.

· · ·

“You never get enough” was how my mother saw my endless cravings.

“I sometimes do,” I'd answer.

“When?” she once asked.

“I can't remember,” I once answered.

“See,” she said.

· · ·

It was with Jim, though—it was in those days of wine and opium and roses and noses filled with LSD powder and cocaine—when my ability to consume vast quantities of things that were supposed to poison me from what one rock'n'roll crowd used to call “over boogie” was tested to the hilt and I thought I was invincible.

What they used to call an “iron constitution” was probably why I'm still alive and Jim isn't.

O
NE OF THE LITTLE KNOWN
facts about miserable small towns such as Sour Lake, Texas, which people living in cities like New York or L.A. can't imagine, is that almost nobody ever leaves, not even during a depression, and that many residents like Eugenia Crawley's graduating class from high school stay where they grew up and are quite satisfied with their lot.

The girl in the blue dress who finally married the right man and became my mother in the nick of time was so glad to get herself away from that dustbowl of lost dreams that the very first day she arrived in Hollywood and went to Billie's, Eugenia Crawley found a gardenia bush and pinned a flower to her hair and it became a kind of tacit moment of thankfulness over the rest of her life whenever she pinned real flowers into her hair over the next half century—a kind of thankful prayer for having escaped from the land of oil and onions and her mother's chili dogs and Sour Lake.

If there was ever anyone able to free herself of all traces of a Southern accent, my mother, Eugenia Crawley, did it. Only when she got so mad she forgot even Texas did she suddenly turn out to have the thickest Southern accent on earth.

(“Why yo' jus a leel piece of shit onna stick!” she'd suddenly say, out of nowhere.)

Getting married to Pietro two months after she arrived in Hollywood did not dissuade her from finding a job and working. Perhaps it was the influence of her mother's incredible history of marriages over the years, which never lasted or settled anything, which made my mother find the help wanted ads in the newspaper and get herself what her mother always called “a leel jo'.”

(“Eugenia, honey, fi' yo'self a leel jo' so you kin be workin' jus in case, you know?” her mother always said.)

Pietro didn't like the idea of a wife who went off to work every morning while he was still asleep, but he felt he could rest easy about the job itself since Eugenia worked as a receptionist/typist in a doctor's office for one of Hollywood's most respected M.D.s. Little did he or even Eugenia know that all hell would break loose five years or so later when the movie star wife the doctor had married was the scandal of the year, caught in a sordid bloodcurdling sex scene with an intellectual from the East Coast who was only in Hollywood for the money anyway and who had not at all counted on people finding out (especially his wife).

The doctor jumped out the ninth-story penthouse window of his office where my mother was the receptionist and went splat on the corner of Hollywood and Highland right across the street from the Hollywood Hotel, where much worse things than those his wife did went on every day and nobody ever jumped out of a thing.