Harlan Ellison's Watching (79 page)

You enter by a tiny alcove, at the rear of which is a stout wooden door with a knocker. One can imagine this door as the setting for a thousand mid-Victorian poppas pointing into the blizzard where their daughters and their illegitimate offspring must go. Or if you're unfamiliar with the cartoon reference, consider it any large, carved, wooden door you've ever had slammed in your face.

If you don't happen to be Soupy Sales or Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones or Lynda Bird Johnson or Princess Margaret or Governor Pat Brown or Cary Grant, that door will more than likely slam on
your
face.

(
Vignette The First:
A ten-thirty night, a stout woman in a pink dress has her foot in the door. "I'm Mrs. Stockmeier. Would you tell Mr. Hanson I'm out here, I've got several guests with me from out of—"

("Mr. Hanson isn't here this evening," the doorman says, looking uncomfortable; the populace is demonstrating. Cut off in mid-sentence, Mrs. Stockmeier grins helplessly at her several guests, in from out of.

(Two mid-thirties teenagers slide out the door, past Mrs. Stockmeier's foot. The doorman tries to get it closed but she agilely re-inserts it. "But we met Mr. and Mrs. Hanson in—"

(Mrs. Stockmeier removes her foot as three cuddly types in poorboys and Jax slacks, all lean meat and dark eyes, slip like oil through the door. This time the doorman gets it closed. The little speakeasy window is open. Mrs. Stockmeier is yelling through it at the disembodied head of the doorman. Her voice is strident. "We were supposed to mention his name, we have guests in from out of—"

(The window closes. Mrs. Stockmeier will return to The Beverly Hills Hotel in her husband's rented Cadillac, making weak excuses to her guests in from out of. They will smile understanding. It may be too much for her. She may take an overdose that night. Maybe not.)

But if the door doesn't slam, you've walked right up, unafraid, to the brass knocker and the brass letters MEMBERS ONLY on the wall, and you've banged in your special staccato and the door has opened wide for you, ring-a-ding right down the rabbit-hole to wonderland.

In the foyer there is a white marble statue. It is a statue of something or other. Not one out of a hundred can tell you what it is a statue of, for the view through the inner door to the poolroom arrests the attention immediately. It is usually a view of something like Jocelyn Laine or Samantha Eggar or a Jax girl, sling-hippedly walking through into the chandelier room. There used to be a huge papier-mâché daisy in a flowerpot on the pedestal, but it isn't there any longer. Someone boosted it.

In the tiny foyer there is a table. On this table there are printed forms that you will sign if you are a card-carrying Daisy member, in the event you are bringing in more than the one guest allotted to you freebie. Each additional guest will cost you two dollars.

Up the short flight of stairs into the first of the seven rooms of the establishment, you find yourself in the poolroom. An old but venerable pool table dominates the room. Framed covers from Hanson's
Cinema
magazine line one wall. Photos of Hanson's Daisy softball team with television producer Aaron Spelling pitching . . . a portrait of Jill St. John . . . a portrait of Nancy Sinatra . . . the cover of a French magazine featuring Natalie Wood . . . a huge and grotesque collage in the shape of a bull's-eye, composed of fashion photos and oddments from slick magazines.

On the green baize of that table some of the best, and some of the worst, pool players in Hollywood restore their virility.

Of an evening, one may see aging matinee idols in the company of sleek, well-fed women, doffing their suit jackets and sighting down the shanks of pool cues like Minnesota Fats, preparatory to demonstrating to their paramours and the gathering-at-large that they are as good as they ever were.

But when the duffs and the spastics cease showing off, some of the most bravura stickwork in the L.A. area may be seen executed on that sloping, rutted, butt-burned table by the likes of Peter Falk, Omar Sharif, Richard Conte, Telly Savalas and Leo Durocher, who is so adept he can let you win, out of general all-around kindness.

(
Vignette the Second:
Paul Newman is playing eight ball. He shoots and stands silently waiting his next turn. He loses. He loses handily. He goes into the bar and sits down to have a drink. A young man, watching the game with wide eyes and closed mouth, follows him.

("Mr. Newman," the boy says politely, at the elbow of the star of
The Hustler
. Newman half turns and looks. It is the same pale-blue-eyed polar ice chill stare Newman gave Minnesota Fats, just before the pool marathon known to millions of people around the world as the penultimate moment of truth contest. "Mr. Newman," the boy says again, with difficulty, looking as though someone had dumped it on him, "you're the greatest disappointment in my life."

(He walks away. Newman stares into his drink.)

The chandelier room, the barroom, with its antique mirrors and antique ceiling fixtures, leads off from the poolroom, past the private party room and the phone booth where the legend SUZANNE SIDNEY WAS HERE AND DON'T YOU FORGET IT! remained unerased for several months on the blackboard beside the telephone. An interesting—and possibly apocryphal—sidelight is that the private party room, which was originally conceived for any large name guest who might want to have an
intime
gathering without the bother of the general clientele looking over his shoulder, has seldom been used. It would seem no one wants to miss out on the action in the big room.

The chandelier room, containing the bar, is 25? wide by 75? long. It is filled with tables that clog the center of the room and line the wall.

And directly ahead, is the main room, the dance floor room, where the major activity takes place. And it is from here that one receives the first totally overwhelming assault of sensory impressions. A dark, kaleidoscopic and somehow vegetable movement of bodies in motion, a noise level of voices that runs subcurrent to the aural slam of rock music blared through a P.A. system at full gain.

Martha and the Vandellas are singing "Jimmy Mack" on the Gordy label.

Waiters ply back and forth at top-point efficiency through aisles clogged with dancers and talkers and gawkers and a surfeit of the beautiful people. Tables that were built for four or six are jammed with eighteen and twenty. One clique here, another there, laughter skirling up from the center like smoke in the Abner Dean cartoon of the few close friends left after the party, their arms umbilically joined, the fire burning in their center and their statement "Ain't we great!"

A lush redhead elbows past on her way to the little ladies' sandbox. Her step is wavery, but the movement is pure MGM circa 1935. And you realize all at once that there are more beautiful women gathered here than you have ever seen before. Not just in one place, at one time, but in your whole life, all counted, from the moment you hit puberty. Tall, short, blonde
au naturel
and blonde by bottle, dark-eyed or smoldering, these women are the true artifacts of our culture. They spend most of their days and nights keeping their bodies in fine tune, like a birdcage Maserati. There is no dust on them, no slightest hint of chrome rust, no vaguest sign of tackiness or impoverishment or loss or stricture. Only platinum and alabaster and lapis-lazuli. When our culture has gone ten million years into the slag-heaps of eternity, and the aphids that will inherit the planet do their archaeological restorations, surely these . . . these slim-limbed creatures of exquisite emptiness . . . these will be rebuilt molecule by molecule and put on display in the plasteel showcases, as the finest, highest achievement of a society dedicated to gorgeousness.

The Turtles are singing "Happy Together" on the White Whale label.

You sit down at a table in the back, near the tiny room where the disc jockey puts his sides on the turntable. You stare through the steel mesh curtains at the empty patio outside, where it is much cooler, where the press of bodies is so much less, which you wouldn't
think
of patronizing, for fear of missing something here in Valhalla.

The maître d', George Samama—who started out working steamships and prior to coming to The Daisy did ten years at La Scala Restaurant—has led you to your table. He smiles and asks if this table is all right. If it isn't, he will change it. Unless it happens that you want one of the tables with the phoney setups on it, the tables reserved for the cliques that have declared them private turf.

You look around and receive the distinct impression that you are in the eye of a hurricane. There is movement from every corner. Not merely the movement of dancers doing the watusi, the jerk, the stroll, the shotgun, the fish, the Philly dog, the monkey, the backbone slip, the slop, the hitchhiker, the James Brown walk, the long tall Sally, the bomp, the Hully-Gully, the swim, walkin' the dog, the Slauson and that poor old arteriosclerotic septuagenarian over there with the chick in the floral-patterned, bell-bottom hip-huggers and Courreges boots, who is pathetically doing a Cro-Magnon twist with softly vanishing hopes of having enough left to hustle that fine young body jerking and shimmying in front of him.

But the movement is a deeper, more oiled, roiling presence. The sway and pulse of bodies leaning into and away from the essences of the room. The sound of voices raised in anger pulls everyone southwesterly, leaning into it, sniffing the aroma of frenzy, harkening to the possibility of actual, authentic
reality
in the raw, as fist meets jaw. The tinkle of uncontrolled laughter pulls the crowd northeasterly, as they struggle with eardrums stretched taut to catch the bit of gossip or newest joke in from the Via Veneto. And there is the movement of history in the room. The history that was this room when it belonged to Prince Mike Romanoff during its heyday in the shadows of World War II. The history of the ten years it was The Friars Club before Jack and Sally Hanson spent a quarter of a million dollars to buy the property. History in the ghostly sighs of the vanished—Bogart, Cooper, Lombard, Power, Gable, Don "Red" Berry, Monty Woolley, S. Z. Sakall, and even all the bright, pretty, ankle-strap wedgie'd starlets who found a moment within these walls when the dream-dust settled on their shapely shoulders. All gone now, replaced by the new generation, the new fastback breed of Hollywood famous, all moving, moving around you as you drink your drink and drink in the sight of grandeur.

The Lovin' Spoonful is singing "Darlin' Be Home Soon" on the Kama Sutra label.

Upstairs there is a ping-pong room. It is very hot up there, no air-conditioning. Only one of the glossy and indolent children of the Beverly Hills wealthy, conditioned to retain their cool through Armageddon if need be, can play a game there and not come downstairs totally unstarched.

In back there is a huge kitchen. It is unused. Jack Hanson does not believe the beautiful people wish to watch other beautiful people eating, so no food is served at The Daisy. Beautiful people are not beautiful when eating. This is a corner of the Hanson/Daisy philosophy, of which more later. Bear it in mind.

There are thirty-eight tables in The Daisy. The legal room capacity is three hundred people,
all
breathing at once. Yet on a weekend night it will seem that
all
of the 350–400 customers are jammed on that 30? × 75? dance floor all at once, and wondrously, no one perspires. They certainly don't sweat. Perhaps one of the less classy ladies will "glow" a bit, but the house rules prohibit anything that smacks even faintly of crassness.

Bodily functions, not to mention reality, are suspended during a night at The Daisy as

The Seekers sing "Georgy Girl" on the Capitol label.

Despite Hanson's aversion to people stuffing their faces with food, empty stomachs receive a passing nod by the serving of pies, cheesecake or a fruit plate featuring apples and cheese.

There are no bowls of peanuts and popcorn, by which absence we discover a laudable and significant keynote to the Hanson conception of what The Daisy means in terms of monetary return:

On many occasions, not the least of which was this author's interview with the Hansons, they have said again and again that the primary motive for opening The Daisy was not to make money. When one considers the incredible payoff the place has made, this remark seems suspect. But when laid against something as bone-marrow basic as the lack of salty incentives to drinking more and spending more money, the remark
must
be believed.

For every liquor distributor who deals with The Daisy has urged Hanson to add these loss-leaders; people who jam peanuts and other thirst quickeners into their mouths through the course of a long evening, in a bar without food, invariably up the bar take by twenty percent. But Hanson has passed this traditional trick of the trade. It would seem he is sincerely
not
in the business of mulcting his customers.

Then what, precisely, motivated a successful clothing merchant and his attractive wife to embark on a financial venture that costs them three hundred dollars every time they open the door? (Computed conservatively—on the basis of salaries paid to maître d', three bartenders, a doorman, a record jockey, between five and nine waiters, a gardener, a maid and janitor, and a bookkeeper.)

Now we plunge headfirst into The Hanson Philosophy.