High On Arrival (4 page)

3

My mother was frantically in love with my father. They had been high school sweethearts and jitterbug champions. Her parents—my grandparents—were none too pleased with the match. They were eastern seaboard aristocracy—my grandfather, James Frederick Adams Jr., was a descendant of the president John Adams. After my mother finished high school, my grandmother sent her off to finishing school to get her away from Dad, whom she called a “half-breed” because his mother was Cherokee. But my parents didn’t let go of each other easily. Mom came back from finishing school, found herself pregnant, and married my dad. I’m sure she thought that kind of love would last forever. For her it did.

I can only guess what promises Dad made to lure Mom from Alexandria, Virginia, to Los Angeles with two small children. My dad could talk anyone into anything. I’m sure he wanted us near him, and she may have hoped for a reconciliation—another reconciliation, those doomed reconciliations that were par for the course for my dad and his lovers.

It was the early sixties, when being a single mom with two kids wasn’t exactly socially accepted, on top of everything else that made it difficult. So my mom left her job at the Pentagon, where she was assistant to Robert S. McNamara, secretary of defense, probably still vying for the marriage she expected and couldn’t imagine life without. She followed my dad—her first love, the man who broke her heart by rote, but most of all by throwing her under the bus for a sixteen-year-old when she had two small children—she followed him across the country.

In Virginia, my father had paid sporadic child support and sometimes dinner was ketchup and saltines. In Los Angeles, nothing changed. Dad bought us a condo but soon stopped making the payments. An eviction notice appeared on the front door and my mother sued my father for back alimony and won.

For all his irresponsibility, Mom never stopped loving Dad. She wasn’t built that way. But when Lenny, the guy who drove us to Summerhill in his Cadillac, came along, I’m sure she welcomed the notion of a financially stable, traditional man who would support her and take care of her.

Jeffrey and I were excited about Lenny too. Mom had been a serial dater and we liked the idea of her in a stable relationship. When they got married—I was nine or ten—Jeffrey and I cooked them a celebratory wedding dinner. We decorated the table with cake toppers and baby’s breath from a craft store down the street and made an elaborate fondue dinner. We had high hopes. But Lenny was bad news. He married my mother and proceeded to beat the crap out of her on a regular basis.

My brother had been causing trouble for a while, but when Mom got married Jeffrey got worse. He enraged Lenny, who turned scary, looming, loud. Our family was emotional—I’ve always been one to wail at the drop of a hat. Even a McDonald’s commercial can make me tear up. But Lenny’s emotions were big and violent. He was angry in a way that was completely foreign to me. He was the antithesis of everything we knew.

Finally, Lenny and my mom sent Jeffrey away to the Bar 717 Ranch, a “clean up your act” school for kids in a national forest near Hayfork, in Northern California. It was one of those places where delinquent kids mucked out horse stalls in order to learn how to obey their parents. Dad taught us to question authority and Mom sent Jeffrey to a school for kids with authority problems. No wonder we were fucked up.

I could barely stand the thought of a day in that condo without my big brother. He and I had matching blankets with flowered patterns on them. Mine was reddish pink and his was blue. When Jeffrey left I got his blanket out of his room and slept with it every night. I’d hold the blanket and keen,
Jeffrey, Jeffrey.

After a year at school Jeffrey came home, but not much had changed. My mother held our household together as best she could. She made cookies at Christmas, we decorated the tree every year, we watched the ball drop in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. But she was still reeling from my hurricane father, who was riding in limos and living in mansions and married to one woman, then the next, and her despair must have numbed her to Lenny’s battery. He broke her mastoid bone. He broke her wrist. When she and I did a teens-and-their-mothers shoot for the magazine
Tiger Beat,
she hid the broken wrist and wore makeup to disguise two black eyes.

Mom was our structure and stability. When we lost faith in her, Jeffrey and I ran wild. We drank, smoked pot, dropped acid, stayed up late, went to parties, cut school. In front of our condo were beautiful olive trees that dropped purple-brown olives. When I came home from school my mother would say, “Your eyes are red.” I’d say, “I know. I’m so allergic to those olive trees,” but I’m pretty sure we both knew that I’d been smoking pot on the walk home. My mom never busted me sneaking out or taking acid. But she now had two out-of-control children. She yelled at us, blaming my father for the drugs, but my mother wasn’t exactly a model of purity. She was drinking more and more. Then something happened that convinced me once and for all that she was a hypocrite. A few hours after a big argument about pot, or whatever, Mom was downstairs with Lenny and some other people. On my way to the bathroom I walked past the top of the stairs and heard my mother say something, then inhale. It sounded like she was smoking a joint. Then I heard her say, “Ooh, the roach is the best part.” After all the crap talk she gave us about drugs! Her credibility went up in smoke, so to speak.

Jeffrey bore the brunt of Lenny’s violence. One night I heard a knock and saw Jeffrey standing on the ledge outside my window. He had his sax around his neck and his albums under his arm. He said, “I’m running away.”

I said, “You cannot leave me here.” Being alone had been so hard when he left for Bar 717. I needed Jeffrey. He wanted me to come with him, but for all my conflict with my mother, I was incredibly close to her. I was her baby girl, and I always would be. If I left, it would destroy her. I was sad and angry to see him go again, but I couldn’t betray her. Not yet. So Jeffrey ran away to live with Dad.

Over the next couple weeks I did everything I could think of to get my mom to kick me out. I talked back. I left my room a mess. I refused to do the dishes and was as annoying as possible. But she wouldn’t throw me out. She adored me. I loved my mother too, but she was focused on pleasing the husband she loved and feared and needed, the same man I loathed.

Two weeks later push came to shove. I wasn’t supposed to be on the phone after a certain hour. Lenny exploded into my room. He ripped the phone out of the wall and towered over me as I cowered in the corner of the room in terror. He was in my face, yelling at the top of his lungs, spittle flying, huge and vitriolic. The part of my brain that wasn’t terrorized was thinking,
Really? All the shit I’ve done and you finally lose it about my phone curfew?

Mom ran into the room screaming, “Get away from her!” She eventually talked him down and got him out of the room. Later she made the excuses that women who are abused make:
He was having a bad day; everything’s okay; you’re okay.
But I was scared for her and scared for myself. Lenny was a tyrant and he was only getting worse. I wasn’t safe without Jeffrey there.

The next day my mother and I fought as I threw my clothes, albums, and toiletries into bags. I told her I was moving to Dad’s. She cried, implored, commanded me to stay, but I was almost thirteen—about to become a teenager—and I was resolute. I loved her and didn’t want to hurt her, but I had to get out of there. Finally she said, “Fine, just go!” and I said, “I will!” and stormed out of the house. I’m sure she still expected me home by sundown.

Our building was right near Gelson’s supermarket. As I walked past the parking lot I dumped my heavy bags into a stray shopping cart and pushed the cart a block down the street to my grandmother’s house.

Whereas my grandmother on my mother’s side could set a table for thirty-six with her two-hundred-year-old Haviland china and S. Kirk & Son Repousse silver, my dad’s mother, Dini, was the social opposite: a full-blooded Cherokee Indian who was, as a child on the reservation, branded with a cross to prove she wasn’t a heathen when she went into town looking for work. Dini was a stone-cold alcoholic whose poison was Scotch and milk and I loved her. I often stopped by her house on the way home from junior high. I’d walk in the front door and she’d say, “How was school? Want a Coors?”

So now, when I showed up at Dini’s with all my worldly possessions in a shopping cart and told her I was moving to Dad’s, she nodded and said, “Want me to call you a cab? Want a beer?”

The cab brought me to the door of the new mansion Dad and Genevieve had rented at 414 St. Pierre Road, near the east gate of Bel Air. I rang the doorbell. Dad answered the door in a tie-dyed caftan, smoking a joint. I said, “Pay the taxi. I’m moving in.”

He said, “Sure kid, whatever turns you on.”

Dad gave me my own wing of the mansion. It was that kind of place—a pink Italian palace that was designed by Paul Williams for Johnny Weissmuller, the Olympic swimmer and on-screen Tarzan. We also heard it had been rented or owned by William Randolph Hearst for his long-term paramour, Marion Davies. Whatever the case, the house was clearly built as a place for rich people to play. First Mick and Bianca Jagger had rented it at my dad’s recommendation, and when they left, Dad and Genevieve moved in from the Chateau Marmont. Dad liked to live large, to show everyone what a big star he was. The ceilings were twenty feet tall. The moldings had hand-painted fleurs-de-lis. There was a mirrored hall and countless antiques. The vast ballroom was surrounded by Moroccan murals of guys on horses and temples with pointed tops. There was a stage, mirrors, a ballet bar, and a supply of wax to restore the floor to an optimal surface for dancing.

The house was furnished when Dad moved in, but he added a few personal touches. He brought a Zodiac Tiffany floor lamp that even at the time was worth thousands of dollars. Even more spectacularly, the living room was dominated by a twelve-foot-tall pop-art sculpture of a man standing on a massive platform that looked like a teacup from the Disneyland ride turned upside down. He was painted beautifully in rainbow stripes and he stood like Atlas with his legs apart, his arms spread tall above his head. But in his hands, instead of the world, he held a neon sign that said HOLLYWOOD. We called him the Hollywood Man. He watched over the mayhem with confidence and humor. I’m sure my father felt that way when he bought the Hollywood Man—like he had the whole industry in the palm of his hand.

My bedroom was painted powder blue with white wainscoting and trim. There were beautiful leaded casement windows that opened onto a spectacular stone courtyard on one side. On the other side French doors opened to a Juliet balcony overlooking the tropical backyard. The bathroom had a claw-foot tub and a shower with three showerheads that were original from when the house was built in 1931.

Dad had married Genevieve in a Chinese restaurant. The ceremony was presided over by a one-legged Buddhist priest. I sat between Jerry Brown and Mick Jagger. Dad and Gen’s infant son, my baby brother, Tamerlane, was there, and I know his room was the only other one in my wing of the house, but I don’t remember much of him from those years. He was mostly under the care of a nanny, and it’s a good thing because the scene at Dad’s was a constant party, child-inappropriate.

Much of the partying took place in my father’s bedroom. In the center of the room was a huge brass bed made for tall people, beautiful people, with scarves draped everywhere. There were plastic molded chairs with built-in stereo speakers. Quadrophonic sound, I think they called it. In the sitting room of the bedroom suite was the baby-blue piano that Gram Parsons liked to play.

After I settled in, I wandered through the tropical gardens until I found my father lounging by the pool. I asked him, “So … what’s expected of me? Is there anything I need to know about living here?”

Dad thought for a minute. “Here are the ground rules,” he said. “You have to be home one night a week,” he said, “and if you stay out all night, never come home in the clothes you left in. A lady never wears evening clothes during the day. It’s cheap.” That was it. The house rules. There was no phone curfew here. There was no curfew whatsoever. My brother and I were together again. Jeffrey wasn’t afraid to ask for drugs. I wasn’t afraid to ask for money. We got both. When it came down to it, the choice had been: live with my mom in a condo in Tarzana, do homework, heed my curfew, and follow Lenny’s rules, or live with my dad in a mansion, hang out with the most famous movie stars and rock stars of the day, and have no rules whatsoever. Taking my love for my mother out of the equation, I thought I had picked heaven over hell.

Any time, day or night, there were at least six people in my dad’s wing. A bunch of incredibly brilliant, well-spoken reprobates. They were like children. Rich, high children whose own children were just part of the ongoing party. I’d come in dressed in glitter, with shaved eyebrows and platforms. I’d start to sing with everyone and stay to get high.

Outside, there was a swimming pool that Johnny Weissmuller must have had built so he could do his laps. To say the pool was long is an understatement. It was 301 feet long, but skinny, and winding like a snake through exotic landscaping and funhouse weirdness. An arched bridge crossed over the pool and led to a stone tunnel with Gothic windows. Near the tunnel was a wall of hand-painted stucco cabanas. All the structures, including the bottom of the bridge over the pool (the part you saw when you swam under it) were decorated with hand-painted murals. It looked like the hybrid child of an Italian church and a Hawaiian lagoon. At the end of the pool closest to the road was a massive waterfall.