Crane (14 page)

Chris Fryer and I were both headed to USC, as was Chris Klauser, who had long-range goals for us as a couple. It was pretty heady stuff to be freshmen at a major university, running our own business, making some money, and in our spare time between classes, traveling the country to visit other institutes of higher learning to show them the irrepressible charm of customized license plate frames. From the practical lessons of accounts payable and receivable and the seductive flow of molten metal, I also slid into a slipstream of film studies.

The USC film school in those days was a collection of mismatched and ancient bungalows off to one side of the campus. Some of them looked like Quonset huts left over from a military post, but the dilapidated structures had the charm of a stray dog simply because they were so disheveled. It would be shocking to see those buildings now in contrast to what the USC film school has become, thanks to its many illustrious and monumentally deep-pocketed alumni. Arthur Knight, a celebrated film critic and author of
Playboy
’s Sex in the Cinema series, was a professor at USC then, as were Steve and Eleanor Karpf, who had just written one of Michael Douglas’s early films,
Adam at Six A.M.
The film school faculty list was an eclectic and fascinating roster of freethinkers, writers, directors, editors, and producers.

Film school was an oasis from the daily reminder of the Vietnam War, which had infected almost every other aspect of campus life. There were endless classroom discussions, campus protests, and ultimately a shutdown of schools all over the country as students stopped attending classes, swarmed campuses, and in many cases occupied the dean’s offices. This was the spring of 1970, and was called the Moratorium. It seemed to me a potent demonstration of the power of the people. We were making a difference. The government was watching. Nixon was watching. Walter Cronkite was watching. The governor of Ohio, James Rhodes, was so attentive he dispatched the National Guard. That little show of executive power resulted in the murder of four students at Kent State that May. The temporary closure of a wealthy, private, and insular school like USC was a barometer of how intrusive and how important the war was to all segments of society. The dean’s office may not have been occupied by members of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), but a casting call for Berkeley types apparently had gone out, because there was a bigger influx of hippies and protest bands setting up shop in and around campus during that week than the home of Tommy Trojan had ever witnessed. After the Moratorium was over, that same longhaired invasion disappeared as quickly as it had arrived.

Even though USC is only twenty miles from Tarzana, it might as well have been two thousand. USC was all the things that college is supposed to be—an exposure to ideas, to a broader worldview, to self-sufficiency and personal responsibility. As a result of the country’s political and social upheaval, being involved in film at that time felt like being in the center of the universe, or at least in the eye of a hurricane.

Directors seized that moment and became the tuning fork for society’s ills. In one of Arthur Knight’s classes we would see yet-to-be-released films and meet their filmmakers. One evening we saw a new film called
Minnie and Moskowitz
directed by John Cassavetes, who was at the height of his fame. He had done important films like
Faces
and
Husbands
and would go on to make the Oscar-nominated
A Woman Under the Influence.
Afterward the students were invited to a pizza parlor called Jacopo’s in Beverly Hills, where we shared a couple of pies and pitchers of beer and discussed the impact of film and filmmaking on our turbulent society with Cassavetes and Knight.

Nowadays, I would prefer the slice and brew over meeting most current filmmakers. While I would have loved to spend time with Mike
Nichols or Francis Ford Coppola or George Lucas early on while devouring a mushroom, onion, and sausage slice, would I want to sit down with Judd Apatow and discuss
You Don’t Mess with the Zohan?
Check, please.

When I entered USC in 1969, I had just missed the wave of visionaries who had gone through the film department, including George Lucas, John Milius, who went on to cowrite
Apocalypse Now,
and the amazing film editor and sound artist Walter Murch. The next set would feature such 2-S deferred future superstar directors as Robert Zemeckis, who later made
Back to the Future, Roger Rabbit,
and
Forrest Gump,
and Ron Howard of
A Beautiful Mind, Frost/Nixon, Da Vinci Code, Apollo 13,
and Mayberry fame.

It was at this time that I met a bubbly, strawberry-blonde art major named Diane Haas. Her laugh was infectious, and her classical figure would have inspired any Renaissance artist. The first time I laid eyes on Diane I was visiting Chris Klauser at her dorm, the modern block of Birnkrant Hall where Diane also lived. Chris aspired to the world of sororities and the social status that conferred, so it wasn’t long before she left dorm life behind and moved onto Sorority Row. That was an alien world to me. I was not interested in the Greek scene, though Fryer and I did go to the sorority house meetings held on Monday nights, ostensibly to flog our license plate frames but really because it was a great way to meet girls and make some money, and it beat the hell out of studying for psychology. Chris Klauser had very different academic interests from mine, and she was much more political than I was. Public office was her calling, whereas I thought I should be wearing a beret and smoking a Cuban cigar while sipping an espresso and talking about the latest issue of the
Cahiers du cinéma.
Our relationship didn’t end so much as it evaporated.

I managed to get Diane’s phone number and so began hours and hours of conversation in which everything—our personalities and others’, our likes and dislikes, the arts, world figures, family dynamics—was explored and dissected. In the dorm she had heard Chris Klauser talking about my dad, the television star. Diane and her family had seen
Hogan’s Heroes
a few times during her teenage years, and her father was a television writer, so we were able to compare notes on living through the ups and downs of the business. She demonstrated a natural cool about my “showbiz” family.

For weeks our universe was the telephone, and it focused our attention on our words. It also provided an escape hatch, a way out of this
fledgling relationship if either of us heard something we didn’t like. But we lived just across campus from each other, and so finally we planned a meeting around our busy freshman schedules. Zero hour was 10:30 on a warm fall evening near Doheny Library. Diane had just finished a painting class and was sporting white paint on her hands and her sleeves. After so many hours of conversation on the phone our face-to-face meeting was a bit awkward. We knew each other pretty well but were strangers in person, so we circled each other like a pair of fencers, ultimately settling on a patchwork brick walkway with a recessed light shining heavenward between us. We talked until the wee hours in that floodlit darkness.

Diane was a beautiful, highly imaginative, creative force with energy and drive. My hand eventually made its way through the beam of light and held her hand. The other hand touched her shoulder or her long hair or cupped the side of her face from time to time. The hours passed in a matter of moments, the night singing of mockingbirds our soundtrack. When it was time to say good-bye, my body blocked the light as I leaned forward and kissed Diane. Her lips were sweet and salty as she kissed then sucked then gently bit my lower lip. Our tongues met in a deep kiss and we held on to each other as if I were shipping out to ’Nam on the dawn transport. We caught our breath, and her hazel eyes absorbed my stare. Then another flow of emotion took over. This was the longest good-bye in my history, possibly in anybody’s history. The five-minute walk to Diane’s dorm took an hour. With blood raging and hormones and testosterone at dangerous levels, we separated—Lara and Zhivago, Elaine and Benjamin, Katie and Hubbell—and I disappeared back into the darkness. Stopping just short of pinching myself, I excitedly debated under my breath whether this whole evening had actually happened. I didn’t even worry about being mugged on the way back to my dorm, where of course I couldn’t sleep a wink.

From once or twice a week we started to see each other daily. When we couldn’t get together, the world temporarily stopped spinning for me. I went through the motions of life until I could see her again. Accidentally running into Diane during the school day was worse than not seeing her at all. The excitement of being near her without interaction was torture.

Some weekends Diane would go home to Hermosa Beach to see her family. I had gathered that there was still a hopeful suitor from high school standing in the wings, and that they saw each other on Diane’s weekends home. I had never felt jealousy like that before. When I bought tickets for
an upcoming Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young concert at the Fabulous Forum, assuming this would be our first concert together, I was wrong. She had already made plans to go to the show with
him.
I spent the evening scanning the seats for Diane and her date. Occasionally, I would watch Stephen Stills and Neil Young jam for a few seconds, but mostly I was preoccupied with crowd surveillance. It was getting to the point where I was no fun anymore.

Chris Fryer and I were roommates in Town & Gown Hall. One of the oldest buildings on campus, it retained as much elegance as a men’s dorm could possibly have. (Only UCLA had begun the radical experiment of coed dorms in those days.) Our room was in the front corner on the second floor of the three-story building and had three windows on two sides plus a small landing on the fire escape where I could sit outside in the shade of a magnificent magnolia tree that towered over our corner of the building. As dorm rooms went it was quite spacious and airy.

One night when Chris was on a date and I had the room to myself, I called Diane to invite her over. After an interminable amount of time there was a soft knock at the door. I didn’t want to appear too anxious, so I waited until she knocked again. After all, it took me at least half a second to get from anywhere in the room to the door. I prepared the mood lighting—turned off the overhead and switched on a desk lamp—and slowly opened the door. There she stood, backlit by the hallway light, wearing a tight long-sleeved white shirt, jeans, and brown boots. We embraced but out of the corner of my eye I spotted a neighbor coming out of his room. It was Don, one of Diane’s fellow art students. It was the first time we had been seen together as a couple, and knowing Don, it would be campus news by daybreak. I was very excited to see Diane on my home turf. I gave her a quick tour of our room—it couldn’t be anything but quick—and we sat down on my single bed. We kissed until our lips hurt. Coming up for air, she noticed Fryer’s acoustic guitar lying across his bed. She got up, grabbed the guitar, sat down, and strummed a few chords.

“Do you play?” she innocently asked.

I accepted the question as a challenge. “Sure, I was in a band,” I answered nonchalantly.

Diane handed me the guitar, and I warmed up with my G-C-D rendition of Cream’s “Sitting on Top of the World.” Eric Clapton had nothing to worry about, but I was emboldened enough to pull out the heavy artillery. In honor of the CSNY concert we hadn’t attended together, I played
“Triad” by David Crosby. I had learned it from Dave Diamond, who had been “my date” at the concert and who is the kind of musician who can watch someone play a song and instantly know the chords.

But Diane’s mind was wandering as I plodded through Crosby’s ode to a threesome. She leaned into my ear and asked, “Why don’t you finish that later?” Gently, she took the guitar from me and leaned it against my desk.

We kissed with a new hyperpassion and soon clothes were flying. I glanced at the clock—Fryer would be away for hours. The last thing I wanted was an audience for the loss of my virginity.

I didn’t know if Diane was a virgin, too, but we spent an eternity exploring each other’s bodies as though it were all undiscovered territory. Not surprisingly, we finally figured it out. Our bodies were slick with perspiration as we lay in each other’s arms in my narrow bed. I was alive with an electric feeling inside my skin. Diane began to cry softly. Were these tears of joy or disappointment? Was she thinking of her CSNY concert date? I didn’t have the nerve to ask for answers to either of those questions.

Diane painted large oil-on-canvas images of women, women whose faces were always turned away or in shadow. They were not Playboy Playmate types but nudes of another century. They were, like Diane herself, Rubensesque. We spent hours at Café Figaro on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood sharing burgers and split pea soup, talking endlessly, and all the while Diane drew ideas for art projects on paper napkins or in her sketch tablet. This was the first time I had been exposed to an artist, and I loved the creative energy that infused the air around her. Romance was in both my head and my heart. We went to museums, galleries, and impromptu art shows in parking garages, restaurants, and apartments. I was a visitor in a foreign world, but Diane made me feel welcomed and a part of the scene. She took my hand and I followed. We went to student protests. We watched John and Yoko pitching peace from a hotel room bed. We saw Elliott Gould as Everyman in every other movie playing in Westwood. It was a poetic, dreamy, and idealistic time, the calm inside the otherwise violent and malevolent Vietnam era. It was what I imagined the Russian Revolution had been like—lofty idealism spinning impotently against a bigger, badder, cynical and corrupt world. Years later when I went to see Warren Beatty’s
Reds,
I envisioned Diane and me marching down streets in protest wrapped around hours spent at neighborhood
cafés solving the world’s problems. We were young and full of ourselves, and she was the ignition for our creativity together.

We hooked up at one point with Ron Heck, the lead guitarist from my long-ago living room band, who was at the University of California, Santa Barbara, majoring in education and surfing. We wrote and recorded songs together at Ron’s ad hoc music studio. Diane and I made eight-millimeter films. One was called
25th Street,
an ethereal and cerebral six minutes shot at water’s edge in Hermosa Beach near her parents’ bungalow. We added a naturalistic soundtrack of gulls and waves breaking. We were so happy with the outcome that we could have jumped on a jet and taken it to Cannes. We had awarded ourselves the Palme d’Or for work in eight millimeter.