L.A.WOMAN (15 page)

The only people who would buy our house, if they came in and saw it the way it looked that day, would have to be people who could envision the whole thing perfectly and have no sense of smell. For in spite of the refrigerator door closed sealing the smell of rotting chili off in a scentproof vacuum, the four days the chili had been left inside without the icebox turned on had managed to smell the whole house up anyway.

If I opened the refrigerator door even a crack, the smell no longer mattered, I decided, because it became scentless once it turned into simple pain.

Once a smell is just pain burning your respiratory tract, the scent no longer bothers you.

The only people who'd be capable of buying our house would be someone who just wanted the land and would tear the place down so they didn't care. Because anybody looking at that mess, seeing it the way the Quakers had abandoned the place, would be overcome by the willies.

And I couldn't let our house be flattened.

I owed it to our house to keep it a house.

And since occasionally, if no one is looking, I suddenly become good out of the blue, I did so that day. I alone was left holding the fort.

I cleaned that house up. I made it look nice. I closed my eyes and wrapped my nose in a washcloth and took the chili to the toilet where I flushed it to the sea so it could kill the sharks. I loaded all the newspapers into the trash and I used Ajax on everything from upstairs to downstairs and on the stairs themselves. When I left that night, the whole house looked relieved.

And when I returned in the morning to put finishing touches around on the woodwork and bathrooms, the smell was gone too. It was wonderful. The house was at home with itself once more.

It was the least I could think of to do, the debt I felt was in some way repaid.

The first people who saw the house bought it.

And that was the end of home.

· · ·

Since then, I've had trouble looking at things that are too beautiful because they're only bound to wilt, or fade, or die—the longer you wait the more certain it will be.

So I try and always do two things at once, so as to get
around going too deep. Like wishing our house goodbye but at the same time washing the stairs.

W
HEN
I
SAW
F
RANNY
the day after I came home from Rome, I nearly choked on the waste of it all—her whole talent lying there untested in that little bungalow court she lived in on Martel. She was working part time in this little library around the corner in West Hollywood—like Garbo working as a dishwasher—and the dustiness over her eyes, living room, and dreams made me want to take her outside like a Persian rug and whack her with a broom.

But for two years she'd been baking senseless in the smog, getting rejected day after day, because she was too perfect-looking for the tiger-lady sixties and she was too sympathetic, cheerful, and Nathaniel Hawthorne for that place—she was impossible to cast.

“I don't know,” Franny repeated over and over that first afternoon, pouring some more brandy into our glasses, her room as evening came lit by a candle, “maybe people like me are out for good.”

“No!” I cried. “You're
great!
I know you're great. Look at you in
Gigi!”

“Oh,” she sighed, “I don't know.”

But a day before I was supposed to go back to Rome after I'd redone the old house, I suddenly
did
know.

“I know,” I said, “I know
exactly.”

I explained how easy it would be to Franny and she looked at me and her eyes blinked three times, and she was filled with the champagne of adventure as she said, “But you're sacrificing your career.”

It was easy really.

And besides, we were so young, we didn't know that just
because we were minors didn't mean they'd not lock anyone traveling on anyone else's passport up in jail like a normal felon—or an international violator of the Geneva code or something.

And besides, we went to Kelbo's on the way to the airport and by the time Franny got her hair messed up enough, she looked so much like me in my trenchcoat that she got right past the passport lady with my passport and into the plane without a backward glance, while I had her driver's license just in case anyone stopped me in her old Cadillac I'd always wanted.

The really amazing thing was that my
pensione
room in Rome and Franny's bungalow in Hollywood were both $87.50 a month.

And anyway, I didn't do it for her, I did it for a burrito which was all I wanted to eat finally.

· · ·

I guess when Ed saw her in my boots, he figured she was on the team because he put her in the part he was going to give me, only with her, not only did she dub her own voice, she did two of the children and one old man.

T
HE FIRST MONTH
or so I was back, I flew up to stay with Lola a week in San Francisco, because Luther was out of town and Lola and I wanted to hit all the thrift stores before they ran out of thirties satin nightgowns (which were twenty-five cents each). But first, we always had to go to the shop Frank Lloyd Wright designed in Maiden Lane where they sold crystal and the place was lit from the ceiling (made out of thick translucent glass) and it had an inside spiral going up to the second floor like the Guggenheim Museum. Among all this crystal and glass were always the Crazy White Cats who lived there—and whom I came to San Francisco because of (next to Lola).

“I've never seen cats who didn't knock everything down,” Lola said, while one was purring in her arms and another was letting me pet it on a glass table. “Do you think that's why they're called crazy?”

“Why was Sam so mean?” I asked. “Speaking of crazy.”

“He wasn't mean—at first—at first he was just crazy about
me,
you know, but you know, he liked cats better than people. He told me women had no souls.”

“He
did!”
I cried. “Was he right do you think?”

“And he said dancers were the only ones stupider than musicians,” she added, “but neither had any brains. Which was too bad.”

“Why?”

“Because he never got to hear me play the violin,” she said, “in fact, getting married would have been perfect for playing the violin.”

“But I thought you had already given it up after the Mendelssohn fiasco more or less,” I said.

“No, no, no,” she said, “I still played it—and a lot better than some men I might add.”

“You know,” I said, “I still don't understand why anyone gave Sam the time of day.”

“He had eyebrows like an Arab,” Lola said.

“Tell me again about the time you were wearing the blue taffeta dress,” I sighed, as Lola's cat slid to the floor and we both began strolling down to the first floor, and once again the tales of the Dinky, the street lamp, and the Mendelssohn
interruptus
soothed me in a way no other people's descriptions of the past ever could. If there was one thing about Lola's stories, it was not only that they had no moral, they were also-completely devoid of ambition. (Even the girl in blue got out of Sour Lake.) Or at least any other ambition than to make as much of the moment as possible.

“Was he right do you think,” I wondered, “that we don't have souls?”

“But we're from Los Angeles,” Lola shrugged, “we had too much else to think about.”

“But Sam was from Los Angeles,” I said.

We both slowed down walking down the sidewalk, as Lola inhaled and let her breath release, saying “Men.”

· · ·

In 1963, when I was twenty, girls my age could either get married and live happily ever after or else fade into oblivion and become spinsters. Since living happily ever after was out for me once I spent the first week in Rome with Ed when I discovered he didn't wring out his washrag and fled one Sunday (only to be informed by the other girls I talked to that Ed was nothing compared to guys they knew who pee'd in the sink—in fact, Ed was a prince), I decided it was better to fade into oblivion right away and got a job as a cashier at the Oriental Theater not far from my bungalow—the perfect job for the rest of my life as a spinster, I decided.

Or at least until I recovered from not being Marilyn Monroe which had thrown me into such a brown study after two years in Rome that I needed a simple job.

I loved tickets: pink tickets, blue tickets, even yellow under-twelve-years-of-age tickets. I loved the way they smelled and how they looked in rolls—almost like reels of film—it seemed inspired, both rolled up into seeing a movie.

Besides, I was not bad. After all, I was a hot tomato all over Italy and it was the same thing at work at the Oriental only in English; it made me feel like I was under glass being in the ornate box office gazebo, a curly blond bed-doll like my mother found from the twenties with a beauty mark, cleavage, and little floppy bed-doll moues, lowered eyelashes and girlish blushes and I was like Dillinger, surrounded by men out to get me.

The Oriental was a “neighborhood” theater, only since the neighborhood was West Hollywood, the neighbors were Jack Nicholson and Stravinsky. I ran into nuns from
Immaculate Heart in line too, and married couples, people on dates, lonely movie stars sneaking in to see themselves fourteen times a week, artists wrecked on mescaline who came for the cartoons, people of “the industry” and kids from Hollywood High just down Sunset a few blocks.

Before my bell jar gazebo passed the best minds of my generation, to say nothing of the cars. Lotuses and Rolls-Royces and chopped Plymouths and immense convertibles went back and forth, back and forth, before my eyes, with people inside—Afghans, ladies with blond hair spread a yard on either side of them, and men—elegant men, crisp sophisticated originals (including Cary Grant), James Dean slouchers, mad Marlons, confidential smoothies, awkward European guys who wore sandals with socks, slinky invisible guys whom girls committed suicide over.

If you asked me, for the first year or two it was enough. I mean,
plus
they paid me.

Anyway, I have always been one of those people who are grateful not to be in Siberia.

· · ·

“Oh my what a lovely job you've got here,” Lola said when seeing me in my proper setting—the usherette uniform at twilight when my light went on. “Oh your poor mother.”

“Poor men you mean,” I said. “No, tell me how you like it with my hair over one eye!”

“De-lish!”
she exclaimed.

“Isn't it fabulous?”

“I never had anything half so much fun,” Lola said, “even when I sold lingerie at the City of Paris.”

Of course Lola was the one person I knew who could look at that job and realize the possibilities, and perhaps without Lola I might have struggled through life without a source of inspiration who was actually living, since in history the only jobs for women that sounded fun to me were the courtesans
in Athens who just entertained brilliant men all day with their beauty and wit—or having a salon like Madame Récamier and entertaining all the brilliant men with her beauty and wit (only poor Madame Récamier, unfortunately, was stuck being married to a stodgy banker, besides, so after all I preferred being a plain courtesan because at least no bankers were there cramping your style). I read
Aphrodite
by Pierre Louýs and the life of a courtesan sounded like just the thing.

I wanted to be perfect in every way—looks, wit, and expertise—however, once I was perfect, I didn't intend to let any man catch me. I wanted to be unattainable.

At least that's how I looked at it. I mean, unless you could have a job like I did where everybody in L.A. could actually
see
how perfect you were, a job was just going to clutter your mind with hysterical details like politics. I mean, how could someone expect you to vote when you were beautiful and had so many different outfits to wear? And so many boyfriends.

Anyway I had it covered both ways because I was perfect plus I was a spinster so all I had to worry about was my image.

Of course, the word
image
was already wrecked out of all proportion by pollsters and politics and
Time
magazine, but in the movie business—which God knows I was nearly indistinguishable from—image still conveys the whole set, not just “charisma.”

I read one time that in the thirties a casting director in one of the main studios classified movie actors—both women and men—as what they projected on screen to an audience in the way of a lay and that Jean Harlow, for example, would be a “Good-Hearted Lay,” while others were “Virgin Lays,” “Exotic Lays,” “Aristocratic Lays.” And even “Tennis Lays.” (“Tennis Lays” I couldn't figure.)

Friends in the early sixties must have thought I was
another Marilyn Monroe Memorial Lay—which I was—especially after Rome when I yelled at the little man and made him cry. It made me really think for the first time in my life about horrible things like responsibility, which I never imagined would come up if all I was was a starlet, but which obviously was lurking even in bright curls, since provokingly bright curls are
bound
to provoke someone from the audience like that little man into thinking you are the Angel of Light and expecting you to be merciful. And if you aren't, then no wonder they thought Hollywood was phony.

So either I had to quit looking like that or else
become
that, and since it was easier to keep on bleaching my hair than to let it grow out and just keep on being merciless, I decided to follow the path of least resistance and do things like give away Mitchell's phone number to Ed.

(Only I made Ed promise never to tell Mitchell or he might really suspect what my mother was worried he thought about that day already, when the FBI arrived at my mother's front door asking for my father—asking about any Trotskyites around our house—but my mother Southern-belle'd it out, “. . . only when they left,” she said, “they went straight across the street right to the Cravens' house, and that was the day Mitchell got blacklisted—but they must have had his address right there with them so they were going there anyway. My God, how could anyone think
I
told them anything?” If I did Mitchell too great a favor atoning for being merciless to that little man, it might look like I was trying to make up for something much worse.)