BEGUILING HOLLYWOOD

I’ve been tossing about as much stardust as I can muster right now. That’s it, this novel is done. I think the podcast of the book runs a bit over 10 hours in its entirety. Let me know if you’d like to hear another Hollywood novel podcast — remember it will take me some time to write it — if you think I should independently publish what you’ve heard, or, if you just want to chat the comments are open. I’d love to hear from you.      

There were heaps — accumulated reminders of a life — all around. Everything that served as an archival asset, or a teaching aid for future filmmakers, I boxed and hauled over to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Clothes, I donated. Books, I culled down to the essentials and gave the balance to the library. I avoided looking at my computer for days, ignored my constantly vibrating mobile, and I turned off the ringer on my landline. I played music at all hours, danced when I felt like it, and slept in any room where I had spent the day organizing. If I couldn’t quite see a plan to execute in my mind, I could in my house. And what about the house? It was so ridiculously big. A home should be filled, specifically with children. I pulled all the papers from my files (that I could find) to deed the property over to Jake, his future wife, and my (yet to be born) infant grandchildren. When I texted Jake the good news he replied, “Thanks Mom. But don’t think I’ll be needing a screening room.” The issue of the house I put on hold.

Life is a series of metamorphoses. Some of them get more airtime than others. I remember once waiting in a gynecologist’s office to see the doctor. There was his desk, on the walls family pictures, on the shelves, some weighty texts. I was curious about hot flashes, so I pulled one of the volumes and flipped to the index. There was a single page referenced, and on the page one paragraph. It said, to paraphrase, that your internal thermostat might go haywire, the medical establishment wasn’t sure why, they hadn’t really studied it much, and the publication’s advice was: dress in layers or take supplements and don’t worry about it. Oh. And it (it, meaning menopause) can go on for ten years. That’s a long time. The comments are open…

Lethal stress can come at you no matter whether you’re onscreen or off. Actors in Hollywood have committed suicide by swallowing ant paste, Nembutal, or barbiturates. George Sanders (check out his performance in All About Eve) swallowed five bottles of pills in Barcelona and left two suicides notes. One in Spanish instructing the local authorities to notify his sister of his death, and the other went like this: Dear World: I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool—good luck. Directors generally shoot themselves, although some jump from bridges or top floors. What’s all this got to do with me, and the time Antoine decided to call instead of nicking his femoral artery?

Gifted with a glib tongue he moved quickly from never-featured actor, to production assistant, to assistant director, and rapidly ascended the dating scale (as he saw it) from the cute craft service gal who brought cucumber sushi snacks to camera at four in the afternoon, to the daughter of a producer. Everything was meteoric with Antoine — his love life, his career, his quick adaptation to style and circumstance. Where do I insinuate myself firmly into Antoine’s story? I think right about here. We were friends for some unfathomable reason, well, that’s not exactly candid of me. We were close friends because my ascent in films intrigued him, my quiet on set demeanor had impressed him, and he was perfectly clear, when the time came, that my position as newly minted studio head made me all the more worthy of devotion. Does that sound callous? I suppose it does. It doesn’t mean I didn’t care for him, or Antoine me. Yet, in large part, I think our early fascination with each other had to do with the novelty the other presented. It meant he could tell me stories when we met of waking up on location somewhere across the Pacific with two bedmates he didn’t recognize and I would gasp and say I hoped he had used a condom. He would recount evenings on hallucinogens speaking to ancient spirit guides and I would ask what they were wearing. “Toga? Buckskins? What?”

The streets of Beverly Hills, unlike the streets of the Hollywood Hills, were nearly empty. One morning I saw a woman of about seventy, with the poise and stance of a dancer, shining long silver hair side-parted like Veronica Lake — probably just as it had been when she was a teenager in the forties — wearing surfing jams, Vans, and a moth eaten angora sweater; walking her very large, very shaggy, dogs. It was an hour later when I started seeing more humans, as opposed to, say, squirrels. These humans were mostly getting into cars, looking distracted, toting insulated cups to balance in the console of their upscale autos. I infinitely preferred the stately solitary walker with her dogs. The more I walked, the more I became aware of the scents of an inhabited morning; frying bacon, the whiff of the first cigarette of the day, brewing coffee. The more I walked the more I noticed a rhythm of greeting after the first nearly silent hour. There was the elderly Iranian gentleman who spoke no English out for a constitutional who touched his cap, the joggers, faces slick with perspiration who would smile and nod, the people meandering after their sniffing dogs who would say a surprised hello at seeing me (as if I had stumbled into their living room, instead of come across them moseying down the sidewalk). Especially notable were the beaming bottle blondes in their fifties, sporting pastel tracksuits and full makeup singing out, “Good morning!” a legion of peppy Doris Days. I began to feel more a part of the city, my street, my neighborhood, and started putting together faces and houses. Fifteen years in Los Angeles and what made me feel connected here, finally, wasn’t my job, or my family, or even my friends — what made me feel connected were strangers, happy to be alive and outside on another sunny California day, just like generations before them, and generations to come. And then I left. I got on a plane one night at LAX with Darla and we arrived at Heathrow in London sometime after lunch.

  We are all the lead character in our personal narrative yet this bothered me. Behind the scenes was my forté, I wasn’t ready for a starring role, never had been. Why was that? And why couldn’t I stop thinking about myself in relation to Cooper? What also bothered me was that I was including him in a category usually known (at least in risk assessment circles) as an act of God, an unforeseen and unavoidable force of nature, and in that instant I decided to stay put, remembering a movie line that justified my resolve. Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above. This sentence was pronounced through rigidly smiling lips by Katharine Hepburn (who played missionary Rose Sayer) as she poured out tugboat captain Mr. Allnut’s (Humphrey Bogart’s) liquor into the Ulanga River in The African Queen. The film was directed by John Huston and the screenplay was by — well there were four writers however, the one on location in Africa was Peter Viertel. I also remembered an anecdote about the whole crew of the movie and all the actors suffering dysentery on location, with the notable exception of Bogart and Huston, who, it was rumored, never drank anything but alcohol. That, my angels, is the myth of drunken genius writ bold. Wouldn’t their livers have turned to mush? Such is Hollywood. It believes its own hype and prefers to print the legend.

Merle Oberon said that thing about Hollywood and one night stands. We’ll talk about her joy ride with David Niven later. Now we’re back to the story of Billie and chapter 19 — A film set is a constantly shifting sea. It’s usually crowded concentrated controlled chaos — until it’s not. The not, those lulls, are very deceptive. You might see a large number of crew members at the craft service table, the lead actor sitting down for a game of chess with the prop man, or the grips and electricians standing idle, always an indication of trouble. Every second of a shooting day costs money. Every second that isn’t accounted for or active can grow exponentially, slow production, accrue costs and fees and union penalties. If you see the First A.D., the oft-harried drill instructor of the studio floor, with nothing to do, no actors to coral, no P.A.s to bark at, no throngs of technicians to hush — kicking back, feet up, inking in a crossword puzzle, you can pretty much guess your stately ship of cinema-craft is about to slam into an iceberg.

  There’s nothing a man can do, that I can’t do better and in heels. So said Ginger Rogers, and thus begins chapter 17. There are so many myths on which the reality of Hollywood is based. Some are funny and fun, some are sad, and some are desperate. I knew that success, no matter how it came, was the one thing everyone remembered. Consider this, around the time I had become a producer so had a young fellow that happened to have a way with finicky animals. Titans of the industry relied on him to run errands and walk their dogs, and as luck would have it he was nearing completion on a film that featured whales, dinosaurs, or comic book heroes — it’s hard to remember the particulars. Two years earlier another up-and-comer had answered phones for a he-man actor who had a production deal at one of the majors with offices off the lot. This amiable youngster was biddable, sweet, and built. The actor had a penchant for youths of that nature, and when he discovered the dulcet voiced Adonis was sleeping in his car he invited him to take up residence in his offices — a couch became his bed; he showered at the gym, and within six months he-man and Adonis were in production on a best-selling book turned sizzling screenplay turned box office dynamo. And the comments are open.    

    And thus, Anne Brown and her roommate, Tatiana Schneider were dispatched to a TV star’s mountain top domicile. They felt charged with responsibility and a certain kind of contempt for their elders’ unmanageable peccadilloes, “God, how gross,” was a phrase they bandied about between them. The star’s property was gated. Anne drove her tiny blue Civic up winding, endless, Mulholland to the gate and keyed the intercom as I had instructed her. It was two in the afternoon. The hot sun was dappled and filtered through a canopy of trees. A dozy male voice responded to the call, “Yep, give me a minute.” It was more like ten. The girls were out of the car and staring through the gate, down a ravine, at a one-story house surrounded by huge dusty California oaks when a tall lean handsome man sauntered out of the house barefoot and wearing a not too well secured white terry cloth robe. Anne and Tatiana unconsciously drew together. The star beamed at them via a wide white smile and sparkling eyes and drew his hand through his pillow sculpted hair and drawled, “Hi-there, girls.” He strode up to the gate and said, “Come on in.” As he stepped back and the gate rolled open his robe gapped even more revealing his well-muscled chest and as Anne’s eyes dropped she noticed the star wasn’t wearing any underwear. He was in that elevated state some men achieve on waking. He was nearly naked and didn’t seem to care; actually he seemed to be enjoying, really enjoying, the sun on his bare skin.

At the moment I’m looking at an old menu from a restaurant called the Brown Derby. On its cover is an imaginary map of Los Angeles with Hollywood at its center. It’s scattered with cartoon depictions of movie cameras, musical notes winging out of the Hollywood Bowl, crooners broadcasting from NBC Radio Studios, and roadsters zipping down Franklin Avenue. It’s an extremely impressionistic guide to L.A. This vast city (really a collection of towns) tends to be represented in its spatial relationship to Hollywood. Please note, the map is not to scale, it highlights the locations (there are several) of a once legendary and now gone restaurant: as I said, it was called the Brown Derby, a nexus of the dream factory drones and queen bees, so to speak. USC, Mid City, Leimert Park, Koreatown, and South Central lie well beyond its margins. I will add sometimes a map is a map, and other times it’s a state of mind. Now you’ve made it to the next episode of the podcast. And if you haven’t already, please vote. No more time to mail it in, either vote in person, or take your mail-in ballot to a drop box or your local election office.

Unlike Mr. Booker, Bob Brown was not a man who, he liked to say, “Waded through god damn minutia,” especially the finer points of male versus female behavior. Bob Brown tended to set goals and chart practical points to achieve them. He thought of himself as an integral, fundamental, part of the clockwork that regularly ticked out the American dream. He was a big picture kind of guy. His mother had been an R.N., his father sold tires. When his big brother, Manny, got him a job in the mailroom at Darryl Zanuck’s studio, Fox, Bob Brown took off like a rocket: from machine age to space age. It never occurred to him, when he met a San Francisco heiress wearing a very becoming snug mohair sweater-set on the Fox lot that his trajectory was about to swing way out of orbit.

There are definitely seasons in California, whatever anyone says to the contrary. In the winter the smog lifts. The daytime skies are a blue that delights my New England soul. At night the lights that sprawl from the San Gabriel Mountains to the sea glow against a heavenly dome of deep Mediterranean blue. People wear sweaters. In 1991 when I turned thirty the film I had worked on for over a year was released. It got critical acclaim over Thanksgiving weekend (a good omen for the Oscars) and as Christmas approached and the daytime temperatures maxed out at 68º the director I had faithfully assisted, Cooper, started to think about his next project.