Loose Diamonds (4 page)

Five

Champagne by the Case

I
have a theory that single women who buy champagne by the case rarely end well.

Disclaimer: I’ve been known to make generalizations based on a case study of four.

Honey Hathaway was the first single woman I knew who bought champagne by the case (except for a random movie star friend of my mother’s). In Honey’s case, it was Cristal. And let me say, right from the start, that I don’t actually know what happened to Honey, which leads me to my second theory that I’ve never tested but always believed—that in some way, the U.S.A. could be a perfect place to hide, just vanish, set up another identity and carry on.

Honey was also the first 23-year-old woman I knew who owned her own house. Big house. Spanish. With a step-down living room and a formal dining room and a sweeping staircase that would do Scarlett O’Hara proud. The rest of us all rented, lived in somebody’s poolhouse, had a roommate or an apartment on Fountain. Honey immediately painted the Spanish tiles in the entryway and on the staircase black, giving it an even more dramatic effect. (I would like to add that she did this herself in short shorts and tennis shoes with an electric sander and a paintbrush, down on her knees, crawling around half the time, which was impressive in itself.)

The street that she lived on had no name. It was a small cul-de-sac off Benedict with three houses on it, hidden in the front by a Buckminster Fuller domelike structure that blocked any view of what was behind. It probably had a Benedict Canyon address but since it
was
hidden by the street and you were more than likely to drive right by it without even knowing it was there, we took to calling the street “No Name Street” and named the house that, as well.

My friend Lisa, who is a casting director and terribly practical, thinks Honey moved to Los Angeles because she had a dream but it was a little difficult to put your finger on exactly what her dream was. I think Honey moved to Los Angeles because she needed a fresh start, a place where she had a little less history and a little more room to carry on. In some way, she needed a place to hide. And “No Name Street” was a perfect place to hide, for a while anyway.

Honey was gorgeous, in an old-fashioned sultry kind of way, deep-blue eyes, dark lashes, soft, curly dark hair, and her figure was a little round, not the least bit anorexic like the rest of us. She was full of useful (or useless) homilies like “Never sleep on your back. Gravity pulls down, you know.” She said it with such certainty that you were certain she was right. But then what side
were
you supposed to sleep on? Facedown. That didn’t make any sense either. She was a big proponent of some kind of horse shot (no clue what it really was), dispensed at a clinic in Switzerland, something to do with anti-aging and this was the late ’70s and she was in her 20s.

I wonder what she looks like now and whether there might not have been some kind of adverse health effect from what must have been a version of a growth (or female) hormone before its time.

There was a lot of speculation about whether Honey was an heiress because someone had to be paying for the mortgage and the trips to Switzerland, not to mention the champagne. She’d moved from Atlanta, but she was born in a small town in Texas. She once told me that the only oil in the town she was born in was at the gas station on the corner. There was something about the way she said it that made me believe she’d been raised dirt poor. But, like I said, none of us could really tell. And to my knowledge, neither of her parents ever showed up on her doorstep and she never went to visit them.

My friend Lisa thinks that Honey got by on looks. I don’t really think that’s true as Honey perfected other things, too. She was endlessly amusing, almost as if it was a honed skill, but she also got the joke if there was one in the room. She knew how to flirt, as if it, too, was a practiced trait. She always kept the table set, so to speak, just in case anybody dropped in. And she was game for practically anything. You couldn’t help but feel she had her passport on her at all times just in case anyone made an offer that she couldn’t refuse. But I think what Lisa means is that Honey didn’t really have any aspirations. Almost everyone else who moved to L.A. had a goal—they wanted to act or direct or write or work at a studio—and Honey didn’t seem to have a definable goal. She had a dream but like I said, it was a little hard to put your finger on exactly what the dream was. Well, not that hard, really. I think Honey was looking for a husband. But the rest of us were all pursuing careers and wild nights on the side, boyfriends, certainly, but marriage wasn’t really in our sight line just yet, so I think we missed the signs. But if she was looking for a husband, she was going about it in a very strange way. She was a little rock and roll, a little Southern, a little old school, if those three things aren’t a contradiction in terms, but Honey, in many ways, was a contradiction in terms. And one couldn’t help feeling that the sort of Southern hospitality and rhythm she lived by were from another time.

The same could be said for Honey’s friend Shannon who arrived from Nashville shortly after Honey did and took up permanent residence in one of the guestrooms at “No Name Street.” Shannon was really striking. She was 6’1” and a runner, with light blond hair and perfect cheekbones and dark-green eyes that were a perfect match to the golden tan she seemed to have been born with, as tanning booths weren’t in the lexicon and none of us ever saw her lie in the sun. Shannon was in her early 20s, too, but she was already divorced and clearly a little shaken from the whole experience. She was guarded, to say the least, or at least that was the public face she put on. She was also born again. Her husband, apparently, had been quite religious. And even though she’d gotten away from him and clearly abandoned the notion of “no sex before marriage,” she kept a little “breadbox” in the kitchen with many slips of paper on which were printed daily psalms that she would pass out religiously if anyone appeared at the door who was the least bit despondent . . .
“The Lord upholdeth all that Fall.” “The Lord is thy keeper: The Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.”
It was catching. One almost wanted a psalm (sort of like a weird lottery card with psychic possibilities) to be handed to you every time you walked in the door. Or not . . . It was sort of strange and contrary to the caviar and champagne lifestyle at “No Name Street.” I should also add that none of the rest of us were really religious (and most of us weren’t Christian), so what felt like an anomaly to me may have been perfectly normal in Minnesota or Louisiana or Texas. Certainly getting “born again” was gaining popularity in the rock and roll world and even Bob Dylan was getting “dipped in the swimming pool.” But Shannon Reed’s reliance on the “Daily Promise Box” was a portent of what was to come . . .

One Saturday morning, Lisa and I stopped by to go for a hike we’d planned the week before with Honey and Shannon, and the house was a flutter of activity. Huge bunches of roses and Casa Blanca lilies were laid out on newsprint on the dining room table waiting to be arranged and accented with clusters of Beach grass and Maidenhair ferns. The good china and silver were set out on the sideboard. Honey was arranging flowers in crystal vases. Shannon was sitting on a stool polishing sterling silver serving pieces and flatware. Lupe, their Guatemalan housekeeper, was in a uniform in the corner, meticulously ironing cloth napkins and tablecloths. The Cristal was already open and there was a pitcher of fresh orange juice next to the ice bucket and the empty champagne glasses. There were croissants and blueberry muffins and a platter of gravlax with tiny triangles of dark brown bread and a bowl of raspberries with heavy cream. They’d clearly forgotten we were supposed to go for a walk, and we’d never seen Lupe in a uniform before. We were a little shy, at first, as we assumed they were having a party we hadn’t been invited to, but that wasn’t exactly the case.

Max was arriving. (Let me say that until this moment, neither Lisa nor I had ever heard of Max.) Max Hayes. Max was the reason Honey had left Atlanta. Max was the reason Honey had come to L.A. He was also the reason for a lot of other things, but we wouldn’t know that until later.

Lisa and I pitched right in, as was our wont in those days, with whatever was going on at the moment—furniture moving, silverware polishing, table setting, onion chopping, mimosas, wardrobe decisions, which generally involved discarding the first five or six choices on the bed or the floor. And when Max called from the airport in Atlanta and told Honey he was bringing two friends, it was decided that Lisa and I should come back for dinner.

When we arrived for dinner, there was a sedate black Cadillac Town Car parked in front of the house with a driver who looked a bit like one of the Queen’s Guards who’d taken a job moonlighting as a chauffeur. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and the big fluffy guard’s helmet had been replaced by a chauffeur’s cap, but the jowls, the bushy mustache, the eyebrows that curled up slightly on the ends, and the ruddy cheeks were intact, along with a British accent that to my ear seemed to hearken from Bristol rather than London. And he was standing at attention by the Town Car just in case anyone decided on a whim to hit the town.

It was one of those L.A. nights. There was a warm wind blowing, and the stars in the sky were almost as bright as the city lights visible from the picture window in the living room at “No Name Street.” The Cristal was flowing freely and the Wedgwood bowls were full.

Max was sitting on the sofa in the living room. He was diminutive and, as I would learn later, always perfectly dressed, with Brooks Brothers loafers and cashmere jackets if the weather was below 85˚. He had short, almost buzzed hair, a sort of Hollywood power cut before it was in fashion. He was a commodities trader, or at least that’s what I think he was, or a banker or something like that, and from the way his eyes followed Honey every time she crossed the room, it was clear, despite his cool demeanor, that he was madly in love with her.

As we’d heard that afternoon, over silver polish, gravlax, and mimosas, they were so in love, they’d been unable to keep their affair “private.” So Plan B: Honey had moved to L.A. while Max stayed in Atlanta to try to sort out his affairs. It was one of those complicated stories about how his wife’s father owned the company he ran with the dubious subtext that his wife “wasn’t well”—a euphemism for mentally unstable, fragile in some way that meant the divorce would utterly destroy her—which gave a gothic edge to the whole affair and the suspicion by some of us that it was a total fabrication. But Max was as mysterious as Honey, so none of us were sure.

Max had arrived with an enormous amount of luggage. The driver, Felix, apparently doubled as valet and had unpacked it all and moved him in.

“Do you think he’s planning to stay?” I asked Shannon when we were alone in the kitchen.

“No,” she said matter-of-factly, “if he was planning to stay he wouldn’t have brought her that diamond necklace and he wouldn’t have brought two friends.”

The diamond necklace was amazing. On a thin white gold chain, a big tear-drop diamond, I’m guessing 5 or 6 carats, surrounded by a white gold filigree diamond-shaped frame on which were six other smaller diamonds just for show. The friends were a little bit mysterious. I couldn’t tell what either of them did but one of them had just bought a Rosenquist so, in addition to what else he did, I assumed he collected art. Dinner didn’t start till ten. At 2
A.M.
, we were still in the living room drinking champagne and eating caviar and there didn’t seem to be any restrictions on the white powder in the Wedgwood bowl. So it wasn’t surprising that at 4
A.M.
, on some kind of manic spree, Max decided to buy Felix, too. Well, actually, he decided that what Honey really needed was a limousine company, and the first cog in the wheel was Felix (who, it turned out, Max had met for the first time that afternoon at LAX). It was kind of amazing to watch. “How much would you cost for a year, Felix?” Felix was a little cagier than you would think, and he negotiated a percentage, too.

That weekend, Max and Honey went out and bought the first of the fleet, a chocolate-brown Mercedes-Benz limo (compact, not a stretch) that blended in perfectly on the streets of L.A. It was sedate and elegant and didn’t draw attention to itself except for Felix, who was gaining weight from the good life and couldn’t break the habit of standing at attention by the car.

Oddly, Shannon seemed to use the car as often as Honey did. They never seemed to rent it out. And the rest of the fleet never materialized.

Max would come in and out of town, spending as much time in L.A. as he did in Atlanta. Honey was supposed to understand—after all, he had a business to run and the business was in Atlanta. He told her he’d told his wife that he was leaving her, but they needed a little while to get the children accustomed to it. The children?

Lisa and I were 23 and naïve, and the idea of children certainly hadn’t occurred to us. The children turned out to be 18 and 20, which meant that Max was probably a lot older than we thought, although I sort of understand wanting to go out with somebody who wore ties.

It was an arrangement not dissimilar, I suppose, to being married to someone who traveled a lot. Max would spend three or four days in L.A. as if he lived here and then go back to Atlanta. It was a little strange that Shannon lived there, too. But it seemed to work for all of them.

Max liked to live large and travel with a bit of an entourage so we were often invited to go out with them. Their favorite place to go was L’Orangerie, the sort of over-the-top, elegant restaurant on La Cienega that was famous for an egg served in its shell with Russian caviar and tuna tataki before its time. It was one the few places in L.A. where you had to dress up and Honey loved dressing up. They also loved the old-style romance of Chasen’s, even though it was a little downtrodden at the time: the elegant banquettes that were built for eight, the dimly lit room, the huge platters of crab, shrimp, and lobster appetizers, the sense of history. Honey used to order the Hobo Steak because it amused her that there was a Hobo Steak on the menu at Chasen’s. (I think it had amused Dave Chasen, too, which is why he put it on the menu.) But like I said, Honey got the joke, as long as there was a joke to get in the room. Money didn’t seem to be an object. The cases of champagne just kept on flowing. For a number of months anyway.