Half Empty (15 page)

“It’s almost like going to your own funeral,” says Avey, after the brief tributes from fellow radio announcers. The star is unveiled. Avey’s friends and family applaud. A local crazy snaps pictures; his straw fedora is banded with a braid of blue-and-white balloons, the kind birthday-party clowns twist into animal and flower shapes, and his ears sport very large fake diamonds. He is trying to get a knot of puzzled German tourists to move, but he squeaks out a high-pitched gibberish that only seems to increase his frustration, as the Germans just look at him. Perplexed Northern Europeans—hereafter PNEs—turn out to be just one of the mainstays of the area, along with leafleting evangelicals, sex workers, harmless ambulant schizophrenics, and beat cops.

There are some places where an intrinsic melancholy might be reason enough to stay away, I suppose, although I can’t think of any. Hollywood Boulevard recently underwent a major urban renewal, a charge led by the building of the Kodak Theatre complex, current home of the Oscars and
American Idol
telecasts. But the neighborhood’s dilapidated, honky-tonk charms, and they are legion, lie in the vestiges of its storied past that endure obstinately: Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, currently home of the American Cinematheque, with its sandstone forecourt and hieroglyphics, looking like something straight out of the Valley of the Kings; the polychrome-plaster opulence of the El Capitan Theatre, restored and now owned by Disney; the affronted but intact dignity of Marlene Dietrich’s star as it sits for eternity in front of Greco’s New York Pizzeria; similarly the star of June Havoc, baby sister to Gypsy Rose Lee, which welcomes shoppers
to the rubber and fetish extravaganza of Pleasure’s Treasures. Only a heartless ogre would fail to be touched by a protective affection for Hollywood Boulevard. It is trying its best. Hollywood Boulevard makes you want to take care of it.

It was ever thus, it seems. Gleaming new theme restaurants and chain stores fail to get at what has always been the essence of the neighborhood. Like other cultural institutions whose heyday is perpetually a thing of the past—reports of the death of the Broadway musical that have been around as long as the musicals themselves come to mind—Hollywood Boulevard was born a little bit sad. The Walk of Fame, for example, was conceived as a means of sprucing up the neighborhood as far back as 1960 when they, ahem, laid Joanne Woodward. Even farther back the writer Nathaneal West lived in a hotel on the boulevard and set his 1939 novel,
The Day of the Locust
, in and around its environs. West’s dark tale of Hollywood concludes gruesomely with two senseless murders and a frenzied crowd out of control, whipped into a fervor of lawlessness by the sweeping klieg lights and bottlenecking barricades of a movie premiere at Kahn’s Persian Palace Theatre, a thinly veiled reference to Sid Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.

Things are a good deal tamer on the day I visit, as tourists mill about the theater’s courtyard, posing with costumed characters—for the most part fictional superheroes, with the exception of a late-Vegas-vintage Elvis—and looking over the hand- and footprints of Hollywood immortals. The tradition was supposedly begun when silent-film star Norma Talmadge was walking in front of the theater and inadvertently stepped into some wet cement. The most popular square remains the joint one of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, a title presumably conferred by the number of people posing in front of it. No one is standing by the
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
co-stars this morning, although a young African American woman has her
picture taken with her hands nestled into the prints of Denzel Washington. Elsewhere, a five-year-old Scandinavian boy (cf. earlier reference to PNEs) dutifully places his tiny mitts into the depressions made by Depression-era cutie-pie Joan Blondell. You know how Swedish kindergartners go mad for
Gold Diggers of 1933
.

Grauman’s Chinese is one of the loveliest and most impressive buildings it has ever been my privilege to enter, with beautifully marked fire exits, to boot. If you go to Los Angeles and do not see it, then you are a dope, as I was the first dozen times I visited that town. It must be an oversight most people make, because there are only four of us on the tour. Where most opulent movie palaces are great, neo-Versailles meringues, Grauman’s Chinese is a lavish exercise in Orientalist escape. The murals that adorn the walls and ceilings of the place, skillful and beautiful traditional Chinese ornamental scenes, were done by Guangzhou-born actor Keye Luke, most famous as Number One Son of non-Chinese actor Warner Oland in the Charlie Chan films.

More movie premieres are held in Grauman’s than in any other theater, ever since 1927, when it hosted its first, Cecil B. DeMille’s
The King of Kings
. The prime seats in the theater are rows seven, eight, and nine, reserved for whosoever is starring in that night’s film. Indicating a seat in this hallowed section, our tour guide says, “Ray Romano sat here for
Ice Age.
” Then, so as to assure us that all the seats are good ones, he points to the front of the house and says, “For the premiere of
Along Came Polly
, John Travolta and his lovely wife, Kelly Preston, sat down there.”

Our guide. Sigh. In his cheap tuxedo at midday, with his mild manner, weak chin, and a face scarified by the ravages of adolescence, he is the embodiment of a doomed and guileless purity, the hapless pawn set upon by the townspeople in a misguided riot of mob mentality. Or perhaps I’ve got Nathaneal West on
the brain. But our docent does seem like the classic victim. Even his evident love for the theater is given short shrift by the powers that be, because throughout the tour, the Grauman’s sound system vomits out a meaningless and distractingly loud montage of partial commercials, snippets of songs, and bits of movie trailers.

We are led outside and up the outdoor escalator of the theater complex/mini-mall, to the adjoining Mann Chinese 6 Theatre. We are being given a tour of a multiplex built in 2001. My underpants are older than the Mann 6. A greasy usher opens the door for us on the second floor. “Welcome to the VIP area,” he leers. (Okay, he’s not that greasy and not really leering, but there is such a sideshow shadiness to the “value added” aspect of this leg of the tour and, let me reiterate, we don’t need to be here! Grauman’s by itself is sublime and sufficient!) The VIP area is neither all that “V” nor “I.” It is just a loungy part of the theater where, for an extra twenty dollars, you can sit and order concessions and they’ll be delivered to your seat. Or you can play chess or checkers or read a book, our guide tells us, pointing to a wall where there isn’t a book in sight. “Go ahead and sit in one of the chairs so you can feel what it’s like,” says our guide. We all remain standing.

The tour ends, as such things do, in the gift shop, where we see two old projectors from Grauman’s, which are kind of cool, and also two wax figures of Chinese coolies that once stood in the theater lobby. Rubbing them used to be considered good luck. Our guide then lets us in on a secret. “There are many people who come to the theater and see how authentic it is and are then under the mistaken impression that Sid Grauman was himself Chinese. He wasn’t,” he says, disabusing us of an apparently oft-held Hollywood myth. “He was Irish and Jewish.”
Who
, I think,
are the genius demographers who think someone named Sid Grauman was Chinese?
But my unspoken outrage is drowned out
by “Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch,” which blasts over the gift-shop sound system throughout his talk.

A little spent, I return to my hotel. Luckily, I am staying right across the street at the beautiful Hollywood Roosevelt, a lovely building erected in 1927. A cool, dark, Spanish-colonial folly of a place with a central lobby that has a tile floor and a splashing fountain, it’s like Norma Desmond’s house in
Sunset Boulevard
if she started taking in guests. The similarities don’t stop at the architecture, actually. There are moments where it distinctly feels like things are being run by a delusional Gloria Swanson. The frustrations are minute but widespread: the wooden ledge that runs the length of my room and doubles as my headboard is gray with dust and remains so throughout my stay. Every time I ask reception to call me a cab, I am told affable words to the effect of “Right away”; my request is then radioed out to one of the attendants in the driveway not twenty feet distant, indicating my imminent arrival out the door in, oh, about five seconds, along with a description of what I am wearing. I emerge from the hotel into a scrum of attendants with headsets and whistles, ready to be of service, and I am invisible. This happens over and over again. The sense one gets at the Roosevelt is that they have bigger fish to fry. Or cuter and younger fish, at any rate. The very first Academy Awards ceremony was held at the Roosevelt in 1929 and the hotel is once more at the burning center of movie-star currency. Young women in skinny jeans and stilettos, accompanied by their men in untucked striped oxford shirts and premium denim, flock each night to the Roosevelt’s bar, a hopping establishment called Teddy’s that, just prior to my arrival, had been embroiled in a minor scandal when the impresaria, “nightlife producer” Amanda Scheer Demme, was dismissed, ostensibly for allowing (I am shocked,
shocked!)
underage drinking by young celebrities. There were further accusations against
Demme that she had made the actual guests of the hotel feel unwelcome at Teddy’s (again, permit my organs to rupture in surprise). Actually, I wouldn’t know since I cannot find the place no matter how many hallways I try. I can hear the thumping of the sound system each day starting at dusk. I enter many a disused ballroom thinking that this must be the way, but I still cannot tell you where it is. Does the Roosevelt have a gym? I have no idea. I do know there is a pool, apparently painted by David Hockney. I’ve seen pictures in magazines, and it’s quite pretty, plus the juxtapositional joke of Hockney applying paint
to
the very object he’s famous for rendering
in
paint is amusing, but again, no sign in the elevator telling me where it might be and staff members who can seem downright yeti-like in their elusiveness.

The exclusion I feel at the Roosevelt is not unlike living in the apartment directly beneath Valhalla, a feeling only amplified one morning when I go across the street to the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf to see Thor standing outside holding a latte. His helmet is a plastic rendition of beaten metal and animal horns, with a fall of synthetic flaxen hair sewn onto the inside edge. The locks spill down over his “bare” shoulders, in reality the sleeves of his costume, a shiny flesh-colored fabric. The musculature is sewn directly into the garment, meant to mimic the bulging biceps and ropey forearms of the Norse god of war. But the stitches around the pillowy inserts are visible, and the whole thing bags and wrinkles around his skinny arms. “You guys drinking later?” he asks his friends, his mouth a checkerboard of intact and missing teeth.

He could use the kind of makeover once promised in the Johnny Mercer song (“ … 
if you think that you can be an actor, see Mister Factor, He’d make a monkey look good. Within a half an hour, You’ll look like Tyrone Power, Hooray for Hollywood!
), and
he’d be in luck, because the original Max Factor makeup studio is just down the street. A perfect pink deco boîte of a building, picked out here and there with golden-plaster detailing of fabric swags, it is terribly chic and female and looks like an enormous jewel box from a Busby Berkeley number, whose lid might at any moment open to reveal five hundred pairs of legs dancing on a mirror-finish floor. To look around it is to smell pressed powder and Final Net with your eyes. The ancient woman who methodically takes my money and hands me back my change with a painstaking if glacial precision is still sporting a hairstyle straight out of
Swing Time
. She might well have been one of the marcelled beauties who paraded these halls back when it was still a salon. It has since been turned into the Hollywood History Museum, the ground floor concerning Max Factor’s specific role in the dream factory. A series of small rooms is devoted, respectively, to a different hair color and that shade’s most iconic star. The For Blondes Only room claims Lana Turner and Marilyn Monroe, among others. Brunettes boasts Liz Taylor as its figurehead. The For Redheads Only room loves Lucy, naturally. And then I come upon a room reserved for “Brownettes,” which is a new one on me and sounds like the affectionate name one might give a much loved and highly effective barbiturate. How fitting, then, that the Brownette for the ages is none other than Judy Garland.

I keep up the period perfection and take lunch at Musso and Frank, a little farther east. Opened in 1919, the restaurant makes an appearance in
The Day of the Locust
. The interior is a relief from the California sunshine outside, with dark-wood booths and a mural of a leafy New England in autumn. By all rights, I should order something authentically carnivorous and insouciant, like a rare steak and a gin martini, but it is midday in late spring, and I opt instead for a somewhat healthier Caesar salad
with chicken, electively excluding myself from a true Musso and Frank experience. I speak too soon, because my waiter, Manuel, who has worked there for thirty-plus years, makes my salad from scratch right there at the bar, a courtly procedure involving a bowl wiped with a garlic clove, the flourished brandishing of a raw egg, and anchovy fillets. Throughout the theatrical preparation, Manuel continues his conversation with a woman sitting a few seats down, clearly a regular. The years have taken their toll and her back is curved over toward the wood of the bar, perhaps in a genuflecting tribute to the curling prawns in her cocktail. Osteoporosis hasn’t dampened her spirits any. Her laugh is freely and frequently unleashed. It is the sound of rocks in a blender, a granite smoothie.

An afternoon rain has dispersed the tourists along the street. The gray light smoothes out the edges and polishes the street beautifully. As evening approaches, I take a taxi (un–thank you, Roosevelt) to see friends. The green Hollywood Hills rise just to the north of Hollywood Boulevard and the cab winding its way through the curving roads of Laurel Canyon is an antidote to the clatter of the street. The houses aren’t the behemoth pleasure domes of Beverly Hills or Brentwood, but rather storybook sweet, with eaves overhung with flowering clematis. In the violet dusk, the vegetation seems to become an even more inviting velvet green, with the magenta bougainvillea and vivid red flowers of the bottlebrush trees standing out. It is all as calming and luxuriant as a Rousseau painting, the perfect break. When it is time to return later that night, the city lies just over the escarpment like a jeweled carpet. It seems so exciting that I can’t wait to get back down the hill.