Full Service (35 page)

With a few dozen people staring at me in my shorts, T-shirt, and flip-flops, I yelled at the usher through the glass doors. “He’s a nominee! Please get him to his seat!” Then I raced back to my car and, with my head pounding like a sledgehammer, I drove back to Beech’s place.

When I got there Beech was in the living room watching the ceremony.

I was just in time. As the commercial that was airing faded out the cameras cut back inside the auditorium and the next category was announced. It was the one for Best Cinematography. Beech and I shot a nervous glance at one other. The name of all five nominees were called out, short extracts of each of the films were shown, and then the envelope containing the name of the winner was torn open.

“And the Oscar goes to . . .” announced the presenter and then, for a moment that seemed like an eternity, time stood still.

Everything froze. I couldn’t believe it as Néstor’s name was called out. Beech and I looked at each other in utter shock. The complete outsider had beaten out all his seasoned competitors.

In the wee hours of the following morning as Beech and I dozed in front of an old movie a cab pulled up and Néstor crawled into the house, drunk and exhausted. He promptly passed out in the living room. In his hand he clutched a magnificent thing, a beautiful, gleaming, gold-plated Oscar statuette. Beech and I were so proud of him. I grabbed him by his feet, Beech took him by his arms, and we dropped him on the couch. He slept for hours. When he awoke he begged for coffee and then proceeded to proclaim that the Oscar belonged more to us than it did to him. He said we were the ones who believed in him, far exceeding his own faith in himself. As far as he was concerned, he thought it was essentially my win for getting him downtown. He couldn’t thank me enough.

Néstor went on to carve out a spectacular career for himself. He photographed films as diverse as
Kramer vs. Kramer, The Blue Lagoon, Sophie’s Choice, Places in the Heart, Imagine: John Lennon,
and
Billy Bathgate
. Sadly, he passed away in March 1992. While the newspapers called it cancer, the real cause of death was complications due to AIDS.

Not long after he died a letter and a package arrived from a lawyer in New York. The letter explained that in his will Néstor had left his Academy Award to me and in the parcel was the carefully wrapped Oscar statuette. I treasure it, but I confess that I regard myself purely as its custodian. It still belongs to Néstor and it always will. What it does do is remind me constantly of my close friendship with him and with all those other wonderfully creative and talented people in the motion picture and television industry whom I have known over the years. Fabulous people, all of them.

S
OON THE SEVENTIES
turned into the eighties. Movie genres had under gone a metamorphosis. The great romantic musicals had virtually disappeared. For want of a better term, the movies had lost their innocence. A new type of in-your-face violence was becoming popular. I didn’t care too much for the overt cynicism and darkness that defined so many of the newer films. I longed for movies that underlined life, love, and lust rather than death, doom, and destruction. Nevertheless, the town that I adopted as my own remained the creative capital of the world and fantastic motion pictures were still coming out of it. Despite what are known as “runaway productions,” when films are shot in places such as Vancouver, Toronto, and states on the East Coast where tax breaks created new incentives for cheaper location filming, Hollywood continued to thrive.

I was in my sixties and as active as ever. I was blessed with good health. All my physical attributes were still functioning at peak efficiency. Praise heaven, my libido was as strong as ever. I was arranging tricks for others, of course, but happily still tricking people myself, as well as bartending and serving folks at dinner parties. Life was good. Fresh young faces graced the screen and the social scene. New people were in town. However, a lot of my friends from earlier decades were gone by then, reduced to names carved in white marble on mausoleums and on gravestones around town. The names of some were now enshrined on the sidewalk along Hollywood Boulevard’s “Walk of Fame.” But a lot of the people I had known for many years were still holding on. Even though their careers had not made the transition in lockstep with the changing times, they were still around. Some clung to the past, others to their dreams, and a few just kept a tight hold on their memories. Sadly, however, one guy who had simply let go of everything was my old pal, actor William Holden.

I’d known Bill since 1950 when he rocketed to stardom playing opposite Gloria Swanson in
Sunset Boulevard
. He and I had met on the set when Gloria invited me over to watch filming. Ever since then we had seen each other at numerous parties and, on occasion, Bill had called me up to arrange for a nice young bit of tail to be sent over to his place to keep him company. Bill was as straight and as masculine as they come. He had a daughter out of wedlock with actress Eva May Hoffman in 1937. In 1941 he married actress Brenda Marshall. The marriage lasted thirty years but it was never a happy union. They both had many affairs and there were periodic separations. They had two sons together, and Bill also adopted Brenda’s daughter from her first marriage. The couple divorced in 1971. Ever since, Bill had played the field. Most women found him exceptionally attractive.

Bill was the quintessential all-American male movie star. His list of credits was astonishing. He made more than seventy movies and was good in every single one of them. He won an Academy Award in 1954 for Best Actor for
Stalag 17
and was nominated for one in 1951 for Best Actor for
Sunset Boulevard
. He also starred in
Golden Boy, Our Town, Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, Picnic, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The World of Suzie Wong, The Wild Bunch,
and
Fedora
. He was tall, athletic, intelligent, good-looking, had a great voice, and was always an asset to have around at parties and social gatherings.

In 1952 he was the best man at the wedding of Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis. Both Jacqueline Kennedy and Grace Kelly were hot for Bill. In fact, I personally saw him visit Princess Grace once when she was out here from Monaco and staying at my friend Frank McCarthy’s place. He arrived in the late afternoon and didn’t leave until the following morning. Bill had a lovely home in Palm Springs where he kept his collection of Oriental art, but he also had a little pad in Santa Monica. He would use it when he was shooting on soundstages at various studios around town. In later years he would simply go there to escape and hide, to chill out. As Bill’s career wound down he became a somewhat wounded and reclusive man.

As starring vehicles became fewer and fewer and as loneliness began to take its toll on him, Bill began to drink. There were times when he called me up to arrange for some young lady to go over to his apartment in Santa Monica and when she got there the place was in total darkness. It would often take ten or fifteen minutes before Bill answered the door, usually staggering and swaying. He was sometimes wearing little more than a soiled pair of boxers or had a dirty sheet or towel draped around his waist. He invariably reeked of alcohol. I went around there a couple of times to see him and the place was a cesspool. Empty bottles lay cluttered all over every room. It was obvious that there were moments when Bill had bowel and bladder movements but hadn’t even bothered to go to the bathroom. He just did what he had to do on the floor or in bed. It was painfully sad to see. There were periods when he didn’t bother to wash or bathe for days or weeks at a time. It was a terrible tragedy. He had no friends. Nobody called on him anymore. The only people who came around were those girls I sent over to trick him. But often he wouldn’t even answer the door to let them in.

Eventually he accused me of emasculating him by denying him the right to see women when I had no other alternative but to stop sending them over. Besides, even if he did let them in he was in no condition to do anything with them. He had become totally impotent and he was always drunk. He couldn’t get it up if he tried. Bill died in November 1981 at the age of only sixty-three. I was notified about his death by, I think, someone who worked in film producer Howard Koch’s office at Paramount Pictures. The coroner said that Bill had suffered a severe laceration to his forehead and had bled to death. It looked like he tripped over a rug and hit his head on a table or the floor. Details about whether that was true and whether he was drunk at the time were never made public. Bill’s death was a real loss, not only to me as his friend but to the industry he loved, to his colleagues who had worked with him, and to the worldwide audiences who adored him.

B
y the time the mideighties arrived things had changed dramatically in Hollywood. The mysterious illness that first went by the ominous name of “gay cancer” or “gay plague” was making a lot of people sick. Many were dying. Eventually, the insidious thing was identified as the human immunodeficiency virus or HIV, the first stage of the killer disease that was wiping out an entire generation of people, not only in the gay community but also in heterosexual societies worldwide. AIDS had launched itself in a vicious war against humanity. It brought an end to the sexual freedoms that had defined much of life in Tinseltown ever since the birth of the movies. I, too, underwent a major change. Tricking—whether for others or doing it myself—gradually slowed down to a snail’s pace. Sex used to be about having fun and a good time. The advent of AIDS didn’t change that per se, but now sex could come at the cost of your very life. So, things changed. A lot. The wild and wooly days were over. The drag parties and gang bangs and swingers’ evenings and orgies became a thing of the past.

But life went on.

One evening in 1981 I was with some friends at Alberto’s, a fancy little piano bar on Melrose Avenue between Doheny and Robertson in West Los Angeles. A very attractive woman with a lovely voice was on stage singing “
Looking Through the Eyes of Love
.” She was no spring chicken, probably in her midforties, but she was trim, with a very appealing figure, a finely chiseled face with an infectious smile, pearly white teeth, and gorgeous blue eyes. She had soft, silky blonde hair. I was immediately taken with her. After she got off stage I cornered her and was surprised to learn that she was unaccompanied. I took her over to a table in a corner and we began to chat. Her name was Lois Broad. It turned out that she wasn’t a professional singer but was simply at the bar that evening to while away a couple of hours. She had beautiful diction—which was not surprising because, as she explained, she was a professional speech therapist. She had come out to California from New York eighteen months earlier to teach in the public school system. She was clearly a very smart and educated lady, a graduate of Cornell and Columbia universities. While living in Manhattan she had been teaching and working in speech clinics. Lois, a divorcée with a daughter in Texas, wasn’t your run-of-the-mill Holly wood type. Ten years younger than me, she wasn’t in the least bit extravagant and was simply a sweet, uncomplicated woman with no ambitions of a career in show business. She was real. She was genuine. She was undemanding and easy to be with. And so we began to date.

Breaking a pattern of committed bachelorhood that I had zealously guarded for over sixty years, Lois and I got married on a summer day on July 8, 1984. The ceremony took place in a park overlooking the Pacific Palisades, not too far from the ocean. A Protestant minister officiated and about fifty or sixty guests attended. Lois was renting a comfortable apartment in Brentwood and so I moved in with her. Needless to say, Betty knew nothing of this new arrangement. Lois, on the other hand, knew all about Betty and was very understanding of the fact that I needed to put in regular appearances at my house on North St. Andrew’s Place where Betty was living.

My life remained as gypsy-like as ever because I divided my time between Lois and Betty, still spending many evenings sleeping over at friends’ or at the homes of clients after a dusk-to-dawn party. I also spent the odd night at the homes of people I knew well and continued to trick. In addition, I often slept in the guest cottage at Beech Dickerson’s place on Kew Drive. Despite my marital status I maintained my bartending schedule and continued to serve dinner and repair picket fences and fix roofs. I also fed the wild raccoon and the cute little skunk and the itinerant feral cat that lived in the bushes of the St. Andrews Place property. As I had long ago entered the twilight of my life, my friends became more important to me than ever. Even though AIDS loomed over us, there were many who still asked me to arrange tricks for them. For a while I continued to do so, but I was never sure whether adequate protection and safeguards were being used. I always insisted that a guy assure me he was going to use a condom with his trick, be they male or female, but who knew whether or not he did so? It was all becoming too risky, too dangerous. As we inexorably headed toward the nineties I knew far too many people who had become HIV-positive or who had died of AIDS. It was obvious that my days of arranging tricks for others were over. It was too unsafe a game to play anymore. That wonderful era had come to an end. Period.

I
N THE EARLY SUMMER OF 1999
, Momma died in her little house in the town of Ottawa, in Illinois. She was ninety-nine years old. Now there was just my sister Phyllis. She was seventy-four and chose to remain in Ottawa. I continued to send money to help support her and we kept in regular touch with one another. Before I knew it the calendar had shed more pages and we had entered the bold new world of the twenty-first century.