American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (28 page)

Love is both the ideal post-Beat Diva (she gives that word a capital) and a riposte to the perceived boys-only misogyny of the original early-1950s period. ‘I had this boyfriend who had me read the Kerouac diaries and he told me that’s how he wanted to live his life. And I thought it was so pathetic that I dumped him.’

Thirsting for a mineral water, but obliged by circumstances to risk a beer, Gary improvises: ‘People have this idea that the Beat Generation was about riding these cars back and forth across the country, but if you made a movie about that it would be boring.’

‘My bio-dad hung out with all those old Beats,’ Love replies. ‘He was the Grateful Dead’s drug dealer. I thought they were pathetic. What I don’t get about the relationship in your script: Bill takes morphine and Joan takes speed – why are they together?’

‘They both drank.’

‘That’s good. I could use that. Druggies like Burroughs because he was a successful junkie. A successful junkie who lived to a ripe old age. That’s why my dead husband liked him.’

‘Mexico will be great,’ Walkow promises.

He shows Courtney research shots of Parícutin, church ruins in a lava field. He promises a wide-angle lens. He gets his location man to tape a bunch of consecutive images together in a panorama that looks like something Burroughs might have produced in Tangier. They discuss turkey vultures. And Mayan death cults. Countdown calendars.

Two and a half hours later, Gary gets back to his room for a Perrier on the producer’s credit card. The phone rings.

‘I forgot to tell you my William Burroughs story,’ Courtney says. ‘Every rock star used to make the pilgrimage to Kansas to meet Burroughs and sit in his orgone box. And then he’d charge you a thousand bucks and sell you one of his shotgun paintings, which are pure trash. But my dead husband, Kurt, he went to Lawrence and recorded this album with Burroughs. It was Kurt fucked up and riffing on guitar and Burroughs droning on top. Maybe that’s why I feel jangly about your script.’

The Sunset Tower Hotel, with its Moorish-Egyptian jukebox façade, its high bands of Aztec relief carvings, its palm trees and eyebrow-shaped pool, had a human narrative of equal exoticism. It began, like the humbler Marine Court in St Leonards, East Sussex, as a set of private apartments. Howard Hughes kept two (at least) for concurrent mistresses. John Wayne lodged a cow on the balcony. Frank Sinatra. Marilyn Monroe. Errol Flynn. The usual Kenneth Anger
Hollywood Babylon
album of conservative excesses.

In a timid hick town financed around the concept of the remake, and the unchallenged dogma that things are always better second time around, revamped vamps give you a smarter picture of where the body is buried. Forget Jean Harlow and Monroe:
Mamie Van Doren
. Who was not Dutch but Swedish (née Joan Olander). Mamie was as strong and career-fixated, in her day, as Courtney Love. She visited Sunset Tower on many afternoons with status-compatible escorts. She auditioned potential husbands. One of them, creosote-dark, beetle-browed, stocky and violent, was her co-star in a primitive Albert Zugsmith exploitation movie,
The Beat Generation
. Steve Cochran. Cochran, she reported, was an energetic but ‘frighteningly erratic’ lover. Mamie’s Proustian confessions, ghosted by Art Aveilhe (it’s easy to imagine him sopping up many hours of hardcore Hollywood gossip), were published as
Playing the Field.
A field the size of the Giants’ stadium. It included: Rock Hudson (premature ejaculation over borrowed crinoline after arranged studio date), Howard Hughes (tennis shoes, later Kleenex boxes), Cary Grant (declined: too dull, chicken basket drive-in movie or LSD seance), Sinatra (declined: too long talking percentages with Italians), Steve McQueen (pillhead insatiable), Burt Reynolds (‘high on jive but low on substance’), Warren Beatty (declined: can’t compete with that level of self-infatuation). And ordinary regiments of the ones who don’t really count: agents, producers, bandleader husbands, baseball-pitcher husbands, talk-show hosts (as booking tax). And Nicky Hilton. The ghosted Van Doren autobiography belongs on the business shelf in the airport, with those Seattle corporate memoirs and tips on how to play the market. The hallucinogenic
folding and unfolding of waxed and burnished limbs, beds made and remade by hirelings, is the medium in which the deal is suspended. The cast list is small. Like Chelsea in the 1960s. All possible permutations work themselves out. It’s intensely local and in-house. Like a flock of sheep serviced by a few reliable rams.

Mamie is refreshingly Swedish and free from gush: she is a working mother; she likes to eat, dance and accept compliments. She sees herself as the end of an assembly line of blonde bombshells: after Harlow, Marilyn – and her nearest rival, Jayne Mansfield. And she is well aware of the black-edged list: the suicides, victims of Satanism, highway decapitations. She is a cheerful loser, she’ll never be a legend: she’s still out there, doing the clubs in South America.

Marilyn, encountered, dressed down, taking a solitary meal behind dark glasses in New York, warns her: ‘Keep away from politicians.’

There is a stand-out bad-journey photograph in the portfolio. Mamie was in Rome: Marilyn asks a favour. Will she go down to Sicily, the volcanic islands, to pick up an award? This is a David, Italy’s Oscar, for Marilyn’s performance in one of the biggest turkeys of her career,
The Prince and the Showgirl.
Mamie is the ideal substitute, the platinum Xerox. And how Homeric is the competitive positioning for the camera; in-sucks of breath, chests out, as the screen goddesses line up. Mamie squeezing the award by its thick base. Anna Magnani crushing it, one-handed, around the legs. Gina Lollobrigida losing it in the froth of her crinoline skirt.

The coming collision is inevitable: Mamie Van Doren (Nordic blonde, enhanced) will meet, and couple with, Steve Cochran (dark Irish, born Eureka), in an apartment in Sunset Tower. Under satin sheets. In the atomic flush of a dying twentieth-century industry: Hollywood. Both performers, male and female (archetypally so), are bobbing along in the shallows below the Plimsoll line of recognition: scandal celebrities, repro stars, alternative choices, reliably workaday (with a shot of basic sex appeal). If Cochran wanted an
and
in the credits – as with ‘and Michael Caine’, ‘and Robert Mitchum’ – it would have to be in television. Cochran was a type, a
Mitchum type (
Confidential
magazine notoriety), without the presence, the displacement. The nerve: to deliver what seems like nothing. He would never achieve Mitchum’s performance in
The Friends of Eddie Coyle.
So, like Mamie, he enjoyed the perks; he took his collateral pleasures. He slept with co-stars as a matter of courtesy, either to advance his career or to exploit his billing: upwardly mobile, horizontally obliging.

Mae West, Jayne Mansfield, Mamie Van Doren, Sabrina: he mined the golden ones. Negative/positive: a balance for Cochran’s saturnine humour, the insolence in which he traded for his reliable cameos: two minutes in a loud chalk-stripe suit exchanging gimlet glares with Dana Andrews (and winning) in Wyler’s
The Best Years of Our Lives.
The voluptuous women, by the dictates of the time, teetered on the edge of transvestism; they overdid it like male impersonators. But there were also strategic affairs with Joan Crawford, Merle Oberon, Kay Kendall, Ida Lupino. Steve had notions of becoming a producer, taking control of his destiny; making a movie about a run south of the border. He was disillusioned with the bits as hoodlums, disposable black hats in westerns. He has a solid part in Peckinpah’s
Deadly Companions
, but he can’t manage that sharky grin, the athleticism of Burt Lancaster in
Vera Cruz.
He is somehow the wrong size, too short-necked and heavy for the horse.

Mamie and Steve are on greased rails. They are speeding towards Sunset Tower. But first they have to shake down on the set of
The Beat Generation
, which is written by Richard Matheson and produced by Albert Zugsmith: in order to ride the media frenzy –
Time
,
Life
, Steve Allen – two years after the publication of
On the Road.
Zugsmith stumbles on a fecund package: ‘the weird “way out” world of the Beatniks’. Diced with serial rape, terminal film noir. Zugsmith worked wonders on minimal budgets. He did everything from
Sex Kittens Go to College
and
The Incredible Shrinking Man
to a strained collaboration with Orson Welles for
Touch of Evil.

Mamie recalled a visit to Sunset Tower with the trumpeter Ray Anthony, who made a brief appearance in
The Beat Generation
(and a briefer one as her husband).‘Our own ragged breathing was the only
sound in the apartment over the noise of the traffic far below on Sunset. A tingling of electricity coursed through my body.’ The intimate grapplings with Cochran were closer to the ugliness of the film with which they were both involved. ‘Steve became increasingly rougher, until one night he very nearly beat me up.’ They parted. Until Zugsmith put them together again for
The Big Operator.
‘But I’ve never been good at a relationship the second time around,’ Mamie said.

The best of Steve Cochran, however disagreeable he found the experience, is his collar-up, fists in pockets, tramp through the cold mists of the Po Valley for Antonioni in
Il grido.
The pilgrimage towards suicide (never return to the point of origin) is definitive. A brief exposure to the charisma and power of a European auteur changed something. Now Cochran determined to author his fate. He picked a crew – six healthy Californian females – and set sail on his forty-foot schooner,
The Rogue
, south towards Acapulco. They could thrash out a script and perhaps – like Gary Walkow (and
Beat
) – find Mexican money and budget technicians.

I was alerted to this episode by the account Paul Auster gives in his 2010 novel,
Sunset Park.
Here was just one of the strange coincidences that occurred as I assembled material for what might eventually become a book. No sooner was a chapter sketched out than the phone would ring with a potential character offering supportive evidence: a diary, an unpublished typescript. Tales of other voyages were coming at me from all directions.

Mamie Van Doren, her career flatlined, has a moment of existential crisis on a yacht. ‘I looked westward past the dim outline of Catalina, out towards the open ocean.’ All she has to do is drift. ‘Happy ladies do not go on solo cruises and drop tears into the already salty Pacific.’

Neither do they sign on as deck crew for Steve Cochran. In Acapulco, the six Californian starlets mutinied and stayed ashore; to be replaced by three Mexican females, aged fourteen, nineteen and twenty-five. Young women with no nautical skills or experience. They were seduced by the possibility of roles in the film, executive producer status.

John Buntin, author of
L. A. Noir
, a useful history I found in a bookshop on Sunset Strip, near Whisky a Go Go, where Mamie partied the night away, described the gangster Bugsy Siegel’s marine odyssey. He chartered a boat ‘to look for buried treasure off the coast of Ecuador’. Siegel, in some bizarre confusion of Errol Flynn pirate pictures,
Treasure Island
and Conrad’s
Nostromo
, initiated what Buntin calls ‘the strangest yachting party in the history of Hollywood’. Guests included the future British Prime Minister Anthony Eden and Jean Harlow’s father-in-law.

Am I being carried away? I hope so. Rodrigo Fresán, friend of Roberto Bolaño, said: ‘We writers are experts at creating and fostering coincidences, the things Chesterton called “spiritual puns”. Our lives and the lives of characters depend on them.’

Auster’s novel describes a person with a first-class plane ticket and a choice of films: ‘ancient fluff from both sides of the Atlantic’. He opts for
The Best Years of Our Lives
and registers Steve Cochran. And by way of Cochran he is drawn into the mythology of the bad journey: ‘The shadow worlds that run parallel to the world we take to be the real world, the not-said and the not-done, the not-remembered. Chancy territory, perhaps, but it could be worth exploring.’

Now they are afloat, far from shore. Cochran’s yacht is heading for Costa Rica, where they will scout for locations. Nobody knows what the script contained. Was it another John Huston-influenced adventure?
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
with Cochran in the Bogart part?
Night of the Iguana
? Cochran and Mamie Van Doren in
Under the Volcano
? Or Cochran and Courtney Love in
Beat
II
, daughter of
The Beat Generation
? ‘He was a rich and famous actor,’ as Don Carpenter said in
Hard Rain Falling
. ‘You see him all the time, these days, having serious conversations with dogs and sadly killing Indians.’

They sail into a hurricane. They come through it. Steve collapses, suffering from an acute lung infection. He dies of oedema, an effusion of fluids into the interstices of cells or body crevices. There is no rush for an autopsy.
The Rogue
drifts, unmanned, for fourteen days off the coast of Guatemala; the stiffening corpse in the jaunty
cap accompanied by three young Mexican women. They are rescued on 26 June 1965 (one day after Cochran’s birthday). The working title for the script was
Captain O’Flynn.

Walking was the only way to reconnect with the solitude of Malcolm Lowry in Los Angeles. His father had him trapped in the care of an attorney (his local paymaster). The relocation followed a series of increasingly desperate telegrams to Liverpool describing events in Mexico City.

BRITISH CONSUL STATES LOWRY SUFFERING EPILEPSY AND ALCOHOL UNDERSTANDS OWES THOUSAND PESOS THEREFORE CANNOT LEAVE WANTS TO GO SAN DIEGO CALIFORNIA PLEASE INSTRUCT
.

Lowry sleepwalks. And coming early – ‘A
walk
? Awesome’ – out of Sunset Tower, I make an attempt to pick up his traces. I set out to find the fatal bus stop at the intersection of Western and Hollywood Boulevard where Malcolm met and embraced Margerie Bonner.