Hollywood Boulevard (5 page)

    He was full of stories, having arrived on the scene just ahead of AIDS slowing down the Hollywood sex- press. He'd been skinny— believe it, he insisted— fresh, raw meat. "This one time I was invited to this A- list actress's house [he wouldn't name names, but I guessed] about a part in a movie. She'd lead
and
produce, so it was kind of an audition. I wanted the work bad— not a great part but solidly supporting: a dumped lover she keeps around for play. Got the idea?"

    I did.

    "So I arrive at her Brentwood manor house and I mean castle and the butler or assistant, whatever they were called then, asked me to wait and this monster dog runs up and pins me to the foyer wall. I mean paws up on my shoulders, standing taller than me and he could make lunch out of my arms, steamy dog breath all over my face. The servant comes back and leads me (and the dog) to the 'spa,' meaning the bathroom— big enough for a New York studio apartment. And she's in the tub under a blanket of bubbles and I sit on a little fluffy chair thing and the dog sits too and soon she wants me to hand her her towel. I begin to wrap it around her and the dog goes into protection- mode pacing and I'm scared to shitting and she says,
Good dog
. And I'm thinking I don't want to die for this part or be maimed either. Next thing she opens a door off the spa and we're outside in a garden overlooking L.A., spread like jewelry before us, and she sits on a chaise naked as Christmas and her legs are open. She pulls me down, I trip, the chair topples, and the dog goes into a crouch, ready to spring. She calls me a klutz and shoves me off and I figure that's it, I blew it, I can go now, only she goes into another door which is to the bedroom. I stand there until she asks what I'm waiting for. The dog is looking at me like with the same question and in we go. She's on the bed and there can't be much doubt why.
Some audition
, she says, and I'm,
Okay I get it now
, and I'm in that fast. Just as I get the rhythm going the dog jumps on the bed and begins to lick my ass. And he's heading underneath. I don't do animals, so I'm done, my rod wilts and I'm outta there. She calls me a queer as I pull on my pants fast as I can. I slam the bedroom door on the dog and find my own way to the exit." He took a breath.

    "Did you get the part?" I asked.

    Fits sipped his coffee and grinned. "It was a wild town back then." The sky was beginning to give up the night; wan morning light filtered into the comfy living room. Fits lay back in his deep- cushioned armchair. "So you want to be an actor," he said just as I sat up straight on the couch.

    "What's the big idea? I
am
an actor! I just wrecked my marriage for acting. Jeez."

    "Okay, take it easy. So you have some creds, that's nice, but you're only at the beginning of the journey."

    I didn't think that was true but saw no point in going into it, digging up the past. I won Cannes; didn't he know that? Did he expect an argument, a defense? But Fits was a tester of waters. He said things to jolt, to get a person to reveal herself, pokes here and there until an opening appeared into which he'd shove little mind swords to see the stuff a person had inside. "So what if I was only starting out?" I said, chin forward. " Which I am not."

    "So nothing,"

    "Okay. All right, Mr. Seasoned Movie Man, what is acting?"

    He grimaced, leaned forward, his overly full top lip briefly curling upward. "What is fucking?"

    I thought a minute. "Fucking is listening."

    "So is acting."

    It didn't start that night, but before long I was listening closely to Fits. I don't know how much he listened to me. We were not in love. Well, Fits was in love with the idea of love, his head turning at every pretty girl. I was briefly jealous, only because I was so bruised and Fits was the life jacket I'd been thrown. He would not let me cling, though. He would not let me betray myself that way in him; he was too honest for that. The world really doesn't forgive a broken heart, or at least not the mourning of it. In a way Fits was just the tonic. There was something about a guy with more experience under his belt that allowed me some perspective, even to laugh at myself. If I was moving in the direction of success, all that seemed to be required was my heart. Fits may have been my life jacket, but I didn't have to take us too seriously. That was an education. I don't think I would have pulled out of that funk without him; I'm not suggesting I ever could have done it alone, but he showed me how to let things be what they were. Good old Fits.

Q
uickies have checked into the room below— one- or twonighters— joyriders, boisterous and looking to party. Heavy- metal rock vibrates through the floor with a pounding refrain:
Let it rock
,
let it rock
, over and over. Is someone being pounded on the bed in time to the pulsing beat? I'm guessing a dusting of cocaine residue on the nightstand. It might be a good time to hit the hotel laundry downstairs, make a dent in the pile of dirty clothes mushrooming in the closet, but, nah, the mess can wait till morning. My grandmother used to say never do wash at night; you can't see the dirt.

    The lovers must have gone out around midnight because I was kept awake until then and was asleep when Andre came in from his night location. I heard him climb into bed and held very still, careful to keep my breathing even. I don't know if we are going to make it, he and I. I'm a grass widow anyway. Andre is entwined in the undergrowth of a movie set, the miniature universe, the womb and birth and life of filmmaking. I know it firsthand. He's faithless anyway. Usually not when he's directing; the film is Andre's mistress then. But he's a director; actresses fling themselves in his path. Casual cupcakes of an afternoon, dalliances, the poor starlets: paper peeled off, icing licked, maybe a walk- on part.

    As I lay pretending to be asleep, I thought maybe my dad had named me wrong. I should have been called Retreat. Or did I desert— as in abandoned my post? A retreater finds safety to gear up and return to battle. Deserters are shot. How
did
my dad get out of the Ardennes alive? He was awarded the Silver Star, which is given for gallantry in battle. Gallantry? I don't even know what that word means. They didn't call it gallantry in 1945. It was simply heroism. Why the change? He was twenty and promoted to captain because they were running out of captains by the hour. He told the few men left under his young command that no one had ordered them to die in the frigid winter woods, so they aimed at anything in gray and scrammed out of there. It was a retreat; he got them out alive. If they'd planned to desert, presumably they wouldn't have gone back to whatever base camp there was. Were they gallant men? Am I a deserter?

    Andre was out cold next me. He'd throw a pillow over his head and that was that. I wondered how he could handle all the pressures and energy and concentration of directing a movie and just crash like that as soon as his head hit the pillow. He hasn't an ounce of nervous energy. I, on the other side of the California king, was wide awake, a jangle of free- floating brain waves trying to pass themselves off as thoughts.

    After I turned down the part he offered me, I learned— back when Fits and I were briefly an item— that Andre had been intrigued by my refusal to work with him a second time. He doesn't direct many movies. Producers despise what they think of as his arrogance, but his films reach a steady audience, an arty following here and in Europe and Japan, and the classier critics love him, so he gets his financing. Word is he'll do
anything
to get a movie the way he wants it. He's co- written two of his films but is not a writer; Joe wouldn't say so, and I would agree. He's visually brilliant, his characters never less than vivid. He's been called the poet in Godard combined with the bite of Clouzot and the careful structure of Lumet. As a director he is exacting and manipulating and doesn't allow his actors to run loose, even undermining their control over their characters— which scares most actors pantless. Anyhow, I heard through an actress who had a small part in
Separation and Rain
that Andre was amused. "It just doesn't happen," the other actor, Mindy Scott, told me. We'd met for coffee at a place near the Beverly Center. "Is it because it's not the lead? I have to ask, I mean, are you all right? I personally would do any part of Andre Lucerne to work with him again. I'd do it even as an extra. I mean, Andre Lucerne's the greatest director alive right now."

    "You really think so?" I asked. Word on set had been that she'd couch- auditioned her part. I smiled, and suddenly Mindy's eye contact wasn't so steady.

    I called Harry the next day. "Did I kill it with Lucerne by de clining?"

    "Interestingly, no," Harry said. "But you can't change your mind now."

    I was biting my nails. "But I blew up that bridge, huh?" I was getting pretty good at blowing up bridges.

    "That's not the way I hear it. Are you ready to go to work?"

    "Soon, Harry . . ."

    Fits laughed when I told him. "Good for you; these directors

can get to thinking they're gods," he said. "Be careful, though, not to turn saying no into a self- destructive pattern."

    He had just wrapped a movie and had time on his hands. He said we should go to Mexico. There was a place, San Quintín, about a third of the way down Baja; he'd go fishing and I could ride horses on the beach. I'd never been to Mexico so I said okay, and we took off that night. Fits drove straight through to Ensenada, where we spent two days in a hotel on the harbor. He taught me how to drink tequila; he'd watch, buying the rounds as I downed one after the other. I discovered real Mexican food and fell for tacos, stopping at every taqueria we passed. Things didn't go so well in San Quintín. The place was beautiful but empty. We had the off- season hotel almost to ourselves. I felt far away and panicky. I felt far away all the time, but this was worse. When the divorce papers came through I felt far away, detached, unmoored and scared. They cited abandonment, meaning I had done the abandoning. I called Joe, my voice weak and drained. He felt lousy too, but I said he at least had the advantage of being at home with the cats. He said the place was full of the ghosts of us, and I cried into the phone. I'd begun to forget what I was so far from as Los Angeles asserted itself, but that open, lonely, windy beach with the seagulls screeching mournfully was too far too fast. I told Fits I had to go back, I'd freak if I didn't get to someplace familiar. He said to quit carrying on like a bad acid trip but agreed to take me back to L.A. the next day.

    That time in Mexico was the beginning of the end of me and Fits being physical together. We did become good friends. Fits is basically a loner; he just let me borrow his world at a time when mine was crumbling around me. Once I got back into the swirl, once I let the business take me over, figuring, finally, the thread between me and Joe was truly snapped, and my heart got a nice big scab over it, there were lovers. Some I remember their names but not much else. At least one turned stormy— on his part. One almost got to me. None were ever as kind as Fits.

    The morning after I got back from Mexico, I picked up the phone to hear Andre Lucerne's voice on the other end. I was still undressed at eleven, probably hadn't brushed my teeth, sipping tea in the kitchen, my stomach wrenched from too many tacos and tequilas. I thought maybe it was Fits fooling around, but he'd made it pretty clear we should let a few days pass without seeing each other. I told Andre I was sorry for turning down the part and was about to drift into the untouchable topic of my recent divorce, but he wasn't interested. He asked me to dinner.

    "Dinner?" I repeated, biting my tongue from adding,
why?
He'd hardly given me a second glance when I'd been his lead. He'd gotten the performance he wanted and hadn't bothered with the on- set nice- nice- let' s- get- to- know- each- other groove. All the actors were terrified of Andre, though he was never genuinely mean or bullying. He was not so much distant as preoccupied, as if each day was profoundly itself and there was only time and energy enough to make it brilliant; all else was distraction and waste. You felt you had to please him, to try to break through and capture his approval, which usually came in the form of a nod and, if really pleased, a nod and slight raising of his eyebrows. If the eyebrows dipped and he fell silent you knew you were miles off course.

    Why was he bothering with me now? Besides the fact that he was married and twelve years older— a very attractive twelve years— and I'd said no to his movie.

    "Dinner, yes. You do eat dinner?" he said.

    "I do, but . . ."

    "Free tonight?"

    As a bird, but there was my stomach and . . . and did I want to have dinner with Andre Lucerne? "I was in Mexico for a few days," I said, "I— I'm a little out of sorts."

    "Ah, the tourista. Drink some tequila— hair of the dog— and swallow raw garlic cloves; you will live."

    We set a date for the following week and met at a little Moroccan place in Los Feliz, a café, very relaxed. I nearly got lost finding the place. Andre had lamb. I hate lamb, so I ate a tabouli dish with hummus, baba ghanoush, and some sort of spicy fish. He did nearly all the talking. He told me his theories on film, which were vast and contradictory. I started thinking, at heart he's an anarchist— if he isn't nuts— all the while picturing Joe making faces behind his back, as in
Who is this guy?
Possibly he noticed my concentration wandering and got off theory and told a very funny story of the making of his first film and how he hadn't really intended to be a filmmaker. "I think I would have preferred to be a painter," he said, as if the idea had just come to him and I was not seated opposite, listening. "If only because with painting one can erase. One is freer. There are too many details that can barely be controlled in making films."