Somebody to Love? (6 page)
It was after Alan and I broke up. I'd switched to Castilleja private school because Judy Levitas went there, and I went to my graduation dance with a blond boy from Carmel. I generally liked my guys to be dark, smart, and dangerous (I still do), and David, who was healthy, blond, tan, and conservative, wasn't really my type. But he knew a friend of mine, so we double-dated for the graduation party, which was held at a local country club. At the end of the evening, we ripped off some clothes from the club's golf shop and then took off for David's place in Carmel. His parents were away, so after we loaded up with lots of liquor, we took off for different bedrooms with our respective partners. It turned out that each woman in the house (both my girlfriend and me) got poked that night for the first time.
Fortunately, I never compared my future lovers to my first experience, which most people say is the most exciting, because I was too loaded to remember it, so essentially, it didn't exist. When I ran into David, the Carmel boy, a couple of years ago in a department store (he was selling furniture), I didn't even recognize him. People often spot me; because I was onstage for so many years, they feel like they know me. But I don't necessarily know them. So when I heard someone say my name, I just smiled politely.
“Grace, you don't recognize me, do you?” he asked.
No, I didn't, but I looked a little closer.
“It's me. David.”
When he said his name, I laughed because he looked as old and lumpy as I did. You get sort of used to looking at yourself in the mirror, but when you haven't seen someone for about thirty-five years, it's shocking. Like those computer gizmos that can automatically age your face, I sometimes get a time-warp feeling of racing mortality when I run into old friends.
No reunion parties for Grace.
What to Do with a Finger Bowl
I
n 1957, while I was at Castilleja High School, I met another one of those icon girls, Sue Good. She was a year ahead of me and was one of the main reasons I decided to go to Finch College in New York. Sue had the disciplined ballet-trained body, the ingratiating personality, the requisite blonde hair, and the good report cards. When I found out that Finch was her choice for higher learning, I thought it would probably be a good idea for me, too. I was still plodding behind the blonde Barbie dolls.
The truth is that I didn't particularly want to go to college, but I
did
want to live in New York City for a while. Asking my parents for twenty thousand dollars to hang out and play in a city three thousand miles from home was a request that definitely wouldn't work, so I presented Finch as a more appropriate option. They went for it.
Although it didn't bill itself as such, Finch was a finishing school for girls from wealthy or prominent families, who went there (if they didn't have the grades to get into Vassar) to learn the basics of how to get and keep a Yale or Harvard man. Not that I was interested in that. My freshman class was made up of women like Sandy Seagram (yup, the booze family), three or four Oklahoma oil heiresses, my roommate, whose father was an Estée Lauder CEO, Cece Shane, who was a rich girl from Beverly Hills, and several more up-and-coming socialite types.
One of the first boys I dated in college was a Princeton boy, Andrew Mathison. No group of people is better at polite disdain and unwarranted contempt than the wealthy old East Coast WASPs. In fact, they're so proud of their lineage as the “earliest settlers,” they refuse to acknowledge that most of the Plymouth Rockers were actually a bunch of malcontents and thugs who sailed over here to escape ridicule and prison back in Europe. My mother was eligible for the DAR, because somebody or other in her bloodline had made the
Mayflower
boat trip. But she considered the DAR a pretentious group of effete snobs who didn't have the courage to go farther west than Connecticut.
Ouch.
Even in the face of that sound information, I managed to go out with Andrew, who came from one of those East Coast genetically incorrect blue-blood families. He was an intelligent boy with buckteeth and a good sense of humor, but I wasn't aware of his lofty ancestry until the seventies, when a woman who was doing some biographical material on me reported that his “people” refused to talk to her about our relationship. His family probably didn't want it known that their bucktoothed scion had banged a rock-and-roll slut. Buckteeth aren't bad in and of themselves, but why, with all that money, didn't his parents slap some braces on their rodent-toothed kid? I'm very grateful to
my
parents for having my teeth fixed. Otherwise, I would have been the poster child for my own song, “White Rabbit.”
Jimmy Gaither, another Princeton boy whose parents had political and diplomatic affiliations and a fancy four-floor town house on the East Side, was Sue Good's boyfriend and, later, became her husband. The two of them, along with Andrew “Bugs Bunny” Mathison and I, went on a double date one time and made the mistake of staying out all night. No sex, no drugs, just some romping around in the snow in Central Park. But the Finch social police declared our nighttime activities to be a scandalous travesty of the “nice girl” code. They found it necessary to call a closed meeting of teachers and housemothers to vote on our possible expulsion from that immaculate school of etiquette. I still remember the hours of fear, awaiting their verdict.
Thanks to Sue's cherubic persona, the faculty admonished us for our scandalous behavior, but we were allowed to stay in school so that we could continue the strenuous curriculum of studying the social graces. No pun intended. We learned things like:
1. Which fork to use with which course in a seven-course meal. 101
2. What to do with a finger bowl. Don't drink it. 102
3. Sit properly, legs crossed at the ankle, never at the knee. 103
4. Find out, in the most subtle manner possible, the extent of your escort's liquid assets. 104 (This was everyone's major.)
Along with the above meaty courses, some English, history, and drama were thrown in so we could conduct ourselves properly at a formal dinner
and
string a couple of sentences together without making any glaring grammatical errors. And they wanted us to be able to speak to each other, hoping that we would develop those cherished and fondly remembered friendships that college life is so famous for. But today, I don't even know if any of those “fond friends” are alive or dead, except one person—Celeste Shane, better known as Cece.
In the beginning of a school year, at an afternoon tea—they were big on high tea at Finch—the dorm housemothers gathered us all in the main hall so we could begin building those cherished relationships that would constitute fodder for old-age reminiscence. That was where I met Cece. You know how some people look irreverent even though they seem to be conducting themselves in a normal manner? Cece had that look. She also looked like the tanned, healthy, blonde Southern California girl that was on the cover of my imaginary “How to Do It Right” handbook. Having already been married once to Gene Shacove, the hairdresser on whom the movie
Shampoo
was based, Cece was one step ahead of most of us in the sophistication department.
She and I hit it off because of our shared sardonic take on the upper-crusty, East Coast social scene that was heavily fortified at Finch. During a Scotch-and-tradition-soaked weekend at Princeton, Cece and I outraged the preppy boys by doing a spontaneous song-and-dance routine that we thought was a harmless bit of fun. They, on the other hand, thought it was completely “unbecoming” and asked us not to return to the campus in the future. The affronting performance consisted of Cece dancing by herself (fully clothed) in the middle of the room—are you shocked yet?—while I sat on the sidelines singing Chaucerian trash to my own guitar accompaniment.
The offending song went as follows:
I love my wife, yes I do, yes I do,
I love her truly,
I love the hole
That she pisses through.
I love her tits, tiddely-its, tiddely-its,
And her nut-brown asshole,
I'd eat her shit—chop, chop, gobble, gobble,
With a wooden spoon.
If one of their
male
college buddies had offered up that song, they would have just thought it was kind of stupid, but would they have asked him to leave and never come back?
Puh-leeze.
I also knew some other less offensive songs, having learned most of them from listening to records by black folk singers like Stan Wilson, Miriam Makeba, and Odetta. When Odetta was playing in Greenwich Village that year, I performed the sneak-into-her-dressing-room-after-the-show trick. Before she'd returned from the stage, I was already in there, playing one of her backup guitars. Unlike the rock stars of the following decade, she didn't have a gang of roadies dragging people away from her. Quite the opposite. She was alone and seemed genuinely flattered that someone was interested enough to weasel her way to the back of the club.
Since I have a low-end loud voice, I could relate to Odetta's style better than, say, a Joan Baez or a Joni Mitchell reedy soprano. She encouraged my moderate ability and gently warned me that being a musician was sort of a hit-and-miss occupation. But she loved singing and told me that that was what kept her going when the jobs were few and far between. I wouldn't resume playing the guitar until many years later when the music business was no longer a life of hole-in-the-wall one-nighters.
Not that guitar was really my instrument, anyway. I mainly used the piano for songwriting. Occasionally I played it onstage with Airplane or Starship, but for the most part, people who had a better command of the instrument were the ones who played keyboard.
“Old” Men
D
uring spring break, Cece went home to Los Angeles and I went tropical, spending a week and a half in the Bahamas with Rolli Miller, another roommate from Finch. She and I flew to Nassau to scan the beaches for boys, get blitzed on four-rum fruit drinks, shit-dance to the steel drum music, and tan our New York–white bodies. We flirted, albeit unsuccessfully, with two great-looking, bronzed, thirty-five-year-old bartenders who were both wearing gold studs in their ears. The ear jewelry, which was way ahead of the future eighties fashion requirement, made them seem romantic and exciting, like a couple of Caribbean pirates.
Neither of us got laid, but the experience was impressive enough for me to decide to spend my sophomore college year at the University of Miami in Florida—the closest I could get to the Bahamas. Obviously, none of my academic choices were designed to actually further my education. The most important attraction in selecting a school was how much
fun
might be involved. But sandwiched between Finch and the University of Miami was summertime in
HOLLYWOOD
When Cece asked me to spend a couple of months with her at her family's estate in Beverly Hills, I agreed. Since I'd spent most of my teenage years in the predictable monotony of Palo Alto, I'd never gone out with any “older” men on fast-lane dates, so Cece had to keep me on an invisible leash so I wouldn't wander off and land in somebody's bedroom. After all, this was the L.A. movie crowd; I was no longer dealing with inexperienced college boys.
The Luau, now a Mexican restaurant called The Acapulco, on La Cienega Boulevard, was one of Cece's favorite hangouts. She and I went there one night, and when I indicated an immediate interest in seeing the classic cars belonging to the older man (thirty years old to be exact) sitting next to me, Cece gave me a kind of wild-eyed warning smile. She was trying to indicate something she couldn't say out loud, and when I stood up and announced that he and I were going up to his house in the Hollywood hills, she gave me an even screwier grimace. I interpreted it as a congratulatory grin. Cece didn't stop me, but she wanted me to know that I might be out of my league with this guy. I dismissed all her facial expressions and went out into the night, actually thinking I was on my way to appreciate some antique cars.
College boys didn't try to jump your bones in five minutes, but this was a grown-up predator looking at the new young meat in town. And I was naive enough to be sucked in by the “Wanna see my Bugatti?” routine. Not three minutes after we got to his house, though, Cece showed up, all smiles and apologies. “I'm so sorry,” she said to Mr. Older Man Car Collector, “but Grace forgot that we have a private party to go to in Bel Air and we're two hours late already.” Another wild-eyed smile in my direction and this time I understood it was the “Hello, Red Riding Hood, that's not your grandmother” look. As Cece and I drove off, she explained that, yes, my new friend probably would have shown me his private car collection—as well as his privates.
Cece's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Shane, had been married a long time and kept a well-mannered relationship. Like my own parents. But unlike my household, in the middle of theirs on any given day, you might find a pet monkey in diapers swinging from the chandeliers over some drunken actress sprawled on one of the beds, crying about a fight with her ex-husband. Cece's mother, calmly wearing nothing but black eye patches, might be found lying facedown, getting the house-call treatment in the massage room. Cece always seemed to take a rakish delight in whatever was happening. I never saw her get angry, but at eighteen years old, with a pleasant and well-heeled family to rely on, what's to get mad at? Like a teenager winning an MTV trip to a backstage band party, I felt like the lucky kid who'd won a trip to Hollywood.
Jill St. John, one of Cece's friends, often joined us to make a threesome. She was extremely intelligent and remarkably beautiful, and when we went shopping at Bullock's, she demonstrated the rich-and-famous ability to seek, find, spend, and acquire. When she spotted a throw pillow she liked, she bought twelve of them, one in every color. That kind of full-sweep spending was not a Palo Alto pastime. Her house included an indoor/outdoor swimming pool, a vast array of tropical fish, and a basement filled with miniature trains. Although she was the same age as Cece and I, she was already living on her own, and unlike most young people, she managed to refrain from any debilitating excesses. She had a mind like a steel trap and could give you details on subjects most people couldn't even pronounce. Lately she's become a gourmet cook. Mr. Robert Wagner is a lucky man.
