L.A.WOMAN (17 page)

“All
of his stuff,” I asked, “you want me to take?”

“You want it?” she asked.

“Me?”

“Otherwise I'm throwing it out,” she said. (She knew when threats would work.)

“When those Trotsky kids took him in,” she said, “his father and I figured already he died—we were Stalinists, we'd been loyal before anyone—he knew what he was doing but all he cared was your father shouldn't laugh at him. And those other friends of his.”

“Oh,” I said.

Everything of Sam's was in my car. When I got back to Hollywood that evening, Yorick showed the films with Sam's synchronized 3-D movie projectors, although it made us feel ridiculous sitting there wearing those cardboard 3D glasses (which Sam had a boxful of).

But his movies were more alive than autumn leaves, objects swirled by in 3D and flew into the Dizzy Gillespie sound track like they were One.

The next day I called a friend in New York and he called a guy from the Museum of Modern Art who saw Sam's movies the next time he came to L.A. and took them back.

But of course Sam would have become a star sooner or later because anyone could have remembered how great he was—and my God, I didn't even know him before, whereas all his friends always knew he was a genius when he was alive, short or not.

Anyway, prints of Sam's picture of my father's hand eventually began costing as much as a Man Ray—that same photograph Sam took in the front yard when I watched them drape the black velvet over the chair,
that
cost three hundred dollars in this gallery in New York.

“You know,” I told Ophelia when I first began taking pictures, “maybe Sam really wasn't so bad—deep down.”

“Not so
bad!”
Ophelia cried.
“Ha!
Do you know that Lola and Aunt Helen once drove down to L.A. from San Francisco together after Sam went to Paris and compared notes about how mean he was to them? Aunt Helen was in love with him before she started having a nervous breakdown—
he
left
her.”

“I know,” I said, “Lola said they never laughed so hard in their lives comparing whether he made them scrub the toilet the same way.”

Ophelia had married a philosopher from UCLA. His name was Jerome, he had red hair, and he was getting his Ph.D. in
scientific philosophy which he tried to explain to me one time on mescaline (both of us), but although he explained it perfectly and I understood it perfectly at the time, the next morning when we were having pancakes at Ship's in West-wood, the whole thing escaped me.

In my opinion, Ophelia only married Jerome because I was in Europe and not there to throw her in the trunk of my car and drive her to Palm Springs until she saw the light. He was the epitome of white folks and everything that wasn't Watts. (Ophelia was never even able to stand rhythm and blues.) His skin was so pink his eyelashes looked like the Easter bunny. If he had even bumped into me by accident, I would have broken out in hives. He was Molly Craven's brother's son, from Harvard.

They moved to a cute little house on Fourth Street in Santa Monica with a string of red Irish setters (much darker than his hair) which kept getting run over one by one crossing Fourth Street which was no place for anything as stupid as an Irish setter to be allowed out, but Jerome always did—just like he allowed Ophelia to take photography. They lived four blocks from the house Lola and Sam lived in the first two years when Lola was still happy as a clam, not in love with Sam even then and before they got married and wrecked everything.

Whenever Ophelia and Jerome invited me over to dinner, it was always so I could wreck everything by getting married to one of their awful friends—guys from UCLA who Jerome always tried to fix me up with—but the only reason I even went was to talk Ophelia into a divorce.

“What are you doing with this person who makes you wear cameos!” I used to ask before dinner, when we went to her bedroom and smoked a joint (during the days when Jerome deplored drugs, not after he found out and changed his mind).

“He doesn't
make
me wear cameos,” Ophelia exhaled,
laughing, “he gave this to me for my birthday—it was his mother's.
Jeez!”

“Look at that dress,” I cried, looking at her gray frock which buttoned up to her neck with a Peter-Pan collar underneath her Peter-Pan face, which was much too pointy and terrified and drawn in those days to go on top of a dress like that. “It makes you look like a shrunken head.”

“Don't you ever want children?” Ophelia asked, looking like a shrunken head.

“Me?”

I got up and looked out the window at the Buicks and Oldsmobiles and Austin-Healys and MGs whip by on Fourth Street where the sun had made everything so hot that day and now was gone, leaving everything hot and barren. Part of the thing about artistic temperament in those days was women who had it didn't dare risk their lives having children around—since everybody on earth expected you to do something with them all day and not just see them around dinnertime like you would if you were most men. So rather than let them wander around Fourth Street like an Irish setter the way Jerome would, it was better to be barren and just have fun.

“But what if I get pregnant,” Ophelia said.

“We can go to Tijuana,” I said (planning an abortion out of motor reflex).

“But what if I want to try having a baby,” Ophelia sighed, in the darkness of the room.

“Try?” I asked. “But it's so . . . terminal!”

“Oh, Sophie,” she laughed, “how well put.”

“Well,” I said, “I'd much rather ‘try' sitting. If you don't mind.”

The sulphury-smelling air from the misty oil wells now cut through the past forever since if Ophelia were going to try having a baby, I'd try and lump Jerome and not think of him as her first ex-husband. Although I already knew he was.

Even though I could see how Jerome looked to
Ophelia—like
not Watts
—in her eyes for a while, one morning she was going to start drinking straight vodka, slither into a flimsy floozy dress, and follow her nose down to someplace cool.

She had a voice like a ruthless baby and I hoped one day it would escape. Or
she
would escape. (Of course after I took her backstage at the Cheetah to meet Jim and she disappeared with him for three days, she at least got away from Jerome.)

The trouble with Harry was that Jerome introduced me to him, because otherwise I'm positive I could have taken him to heart that night at once. There were all sorts of things about him that weren't too bad, like even that first night for dinner when Jerome fixed us up, Harry didn't come over empty-handed—he brought a damp bag of chocolate chip cookies (with kif in them) and about two inches of 45s, records like “Death of an Angel” and Little Julian Herrera songs. And he bought a gallon of Italian Swiss Colony Vin Rosé which he insisted we drink at room temperature—which, since it was 108 degrees that night, was only possible if you took a handful of Romilar which, it turned out, Harry supplied.

I held a handful of Romilar, but I didn't take them right away, but said, “What's this do?”

“Ooooooo,” he beamed (he looked like an angelic Hell's Angel). “Nice, nice, nice. Synthetic morphine.”

I took them.

“You mean they just sell these things in stores?” I asked, staring at the label (this was before they were withdrawn from the market and the synthetic morphine was eliminated about three months later; they looked like little sequin-shaped mustard pills). I took twenty or thirty.

If only a relative of Molly's hadn't been instrumental in me meeting Harry, I'm sure I would have inspired him then and there. But I had to wait three days to finally kiss him, such a taboo blocked Harry.

Anyway, how could I love at first sight anyone going to UCLA. Even if he did look like a juvenile delinquent.

The next day Ophelia called me up and said, “Well?”

“Oh, God,” I said, “what time is it? My brains are falling out.”

“He's the most brilliant guy in the whole school,” Ophelia said, “it's all a pose, Jerome says, those chains and drugs. He's not really crazy.”

“Oh,” I said.

It was nearly time to get myself presentable enough to retreat to the Oriental—if I ever could remember the right change for a five-dollar bill through my hangover.

“Did you like him?” Ophelia asked.

“I don't know,” I replied, “Jerome's friends, they're all so square.”

The summer Harry and I met when he was an intern at UCLA, he opened four art galleries all over L.A. and changed his major to Art History, which Jerome insists was my fault.

“He could have been a brilliant surgeon!” Jerome said.

“Well,” I explained, “I mean, I thought he really knew what he was doing to have been able to look like that.”

“So for that he wrecks his whole future?” Jerome cried. “What did you say to him anyway?”

“I wanted him to open a restaurant,” I explained, “but he took it the wrong way. He must have had this art stuff in the back of his mind all along.”

Six months later, Harry dropped out of UCLA entirely and got a job as an assistant museum curator and started wearing
suits!

“But Harry, we can't go see The Byrds at the Trip on their first night back in L.A. with you in a fucking suit!!!” I said, when he came to pick me up. “Everybody'll think you're my father!! Look how short my skirt is, I'm not going out in this mini with you like that!!!”

(But of course I had to, I mean it was too late to make his hair any longer if we were going to get there to see Paul Butterfield, the opening act.)

Harry was consistent about one thing from the very beginning and that was art—for not only did he know about it, he knew what he liked. (He'd been ravaged by seeing some kind of Marcel Duchamp collection in Pasadena when he was little and unbeknownst to anyone had been a prisoner ever since.) And he never referred to my photographs as “nice little snaps.”

“No wonder I didn't think I could ever fuck you,” I said to him. “You take everything so
seriously!!!
You act like I need a bedside manner—you act like everybody does!”

“This is my favorite,” Harry said, regarding my favorite too—a photograph I took of all these criss-crossed palm trees growing in different directions on Foothill (right near where Lola wore her blue taffeta dress).

“It's only for sentimental value,” I said, blushing, his eyes were such radar, I was afraid he'd pick up the scent practically.

Embracing Harry for dear life on the back of his motorcycle the night he drove me home from Jerome and Ophelia's was as close as I ever came to a genuine Jewish doctor like my grandmother from Kiev hoped I'd marry.

March 3, 1962

Dear Momser and Pomser,

Why are you staying in Heidelberg so long? When are you coming home? You can live in the Pagoda Chateau—really, Heidelberg's so full of chilblains.

Love,

Sophie-Pophie

March 15, 1962

Darling dear:

Your father and I have just come back from Spain where we visited some very nice friends of the Jameses' who own a lovely castle on the Cote d'Azur and we ate, and ate and ate. Your father will stay here for another year gathering material for his magnum opus. This summer will find us in Fiesole—your sister will be with us, you can drop by too if it's not out of your way. Bonnie seems to be learning French and Frenchmen.

Your Ma

Letters like the two above started in 1962 when I came back from Rome and went on for about ten years. My parents seemed satisfied just to stay in castles and eat, plus go to Venice for little potatoes which my mother was crazy about and white truffles from Milan in December, which kept her stuck there like glue. My father kept getting extensions on his Ford Foundation grant and since there seemed to be an unending source of Bachiana in Marburg (twelve k's from Heidelberg), he didn't care if it was snowing or raining or whether he got taquitos or anything.

They did come back once—just once—in 1966 when my father was invited to direct a seminar at Cal Tech one summer on Early Music—and he had these little concerts every fortnight where all the people who'd drive to Pasadena for a concert of Palestrina would go, mostly the little old ladies who still lived there (the kind who used to frown on the movie colony and thought Hollywood was just a bunch of gypsies in tents).

(Maybe we were, but my parents were gypsies at least in castles.)

As I look back on myself (now that I'm older and dimmer), I must have been nuts because Harry was the most stable force in my life—and Harry wasn't any too stable a force even when they imported him to New York and made him a museum director (where everyone working with him wore buttons saying “Harry Will Be Back in 20 Minutes” since nobody ever knew where he was).

But the other guys, like Maurice, who got busted for kilos of grass in a bass fiddle case, or Douglas, the actor from London who looked like a lad of seventeen until his wife and five children appeared, or Ron, the TV cowboy star who was six feet five inches and rode around in a metallic Kelly-green Cadillac convertible to match his eyes until he decided to go to Ireland where he heard the whole place was Kelly green (returning a shell of his former self from the rain), or Grant, who taught acting only I couldn't act so when we fell in love doom was in the air: compared to guys like that, Harry was a pillar of the community.

And I was an L.A. woman. In fact, looking back on those one-night stands, I must have been crazy. Yet there were thousands of girls living between Sunset and Santa Monica in between La Brea and La Cienega who painted the town red like me—and who got away with it too.

It wasn't as though I were alone.

But then there were girls of course who painted the town red and didn't get away with it. I mean, there was a darker side to life, for some girls, no matter how hard they tried, were always going to be ladies (my idea of the darker side).