L.A.WOMAN (11 page)

“Why don't you poison her?” I suggested.

“Yeah,” Shelly said, “but what would we poison her with?”

“Iodine,” I said.

“Okay,” Shelly said thoughtfully.

But we forgot.

As if being blacklisted wasn't enough, terrorizing Shelly into two years of the walks to school being occasionally spiked with visions of a Poor House somewhere out on the edge of L.A. where we'd bring her a tuna sandwich, then actual figments of Lillian Hellman's imagination materialized and began making phone calls to Molly calling her a dirty Commie and anonymously threatening her with scary phone calls from honest real Americans who were proud of their country and therefore if she came and showed her face at the PTA meeting the next Friday, she'd get what she deserved and they were just warning her not to come, for “The PTA don't allow no reds.”

“Ooooooo,” Molly cried, dropping the receiver like a horrible surprise of death.

“Oh,” she said to my mother running as fast as she could across the street before they could catch her or trap her alone in her house, “I'm afraid to go anywhere, now I'll never go to another PTA not ever, oh, I'm so afraid what shall I do, oooooo. . . .”

Luckily Molly was so wracked dry with fear and hiccups and sobbing that she didn't notice what I noticed, which was my mother leaving her halo in a shell of hollowness while she snapped into a fully realized raging snake which she snapped right back out of, thank God, and was relighting up her almost perpetual glow before Molly saw it and knew that it couldn't have happened therefore she must be crazy and she'd have a nervous breakdown to match.

“Now listen honey dear,” my mother began, calling her the soothing things she called me to fix my nightmares at night or my screams in the daytime from penicillin shots mainly, and if anyone ever needed fixing and being called honey dear it was Molly. My mother's hand stroking Molly's neat head calmed her hiccups and left her only just weeping.

“Oh, I'm such a coward,” Molly wept.

“No you're not,” my mother said, “we won't let those jerks talk like that to us, honey darling, we'll not let them mean one thing because they don't and we'll just come right into that meeting together in the front with the two of us together and lookee you heah, me and you will see if they aren't just all talk and nothin' but a leel bit of shit on a stick, just you wait now, just you see, darling honey bunny darling girl, we'll show them we know they don't mean those horrible calls. . . .”

“But you, they'll, you can't just . . . ,” Molly raised her head to say, for she knew anyone befriending a Communist in the fifties—when Hollywood went on TV in black masks, which was the last thing in the world I as a child would turn to on TV, but the only thing any adults wanted to watch all day—would make a suspicious citizen wonder if my mother was pink or my father was to be found as favoring Trotsky, and suppose those marked Americans informing on TV who were so stupid and talked like it was okay to interrupt when even I, by the age of ten, knew it wasn't, suppose one of those dreadful men in suits who looked so ugly and uninterestingly blank just beyond ugly were to notice who Trotsky was and not like it so my father would be an out-of-work musician blacklisted like Mitchell Craven and we'd be all in the Poor House together off somewhere at the edge of L.A. where all I'd do would be to eat tunafish sandwiches and brood that my mother's ability to pass unscathed through everything else till now suddenly turned out to have been merely the way a saint might seem who was not a saint but merely passing as one until suddenly she went too far which they never would have noticed if she'd stayed home from the PTA.

But no, she went to the PTA with Molly.

Naturally no one at the time (except Molly who had little sympathy with saints) even noticed that my mother might be doing a brave act because saints are lucky and don't have to be brave.

In school they tried to educate me to believe that life had nothing to do with luck but I was sorry for them and so was my mother.

When I went to Hollywood High it was run by a bunch of vicious virgins—sorority sisters—who maimed friends of mine for life, whether they made it or not, since once they tried to get in a club at all, they were finished. If you asked me, the only thing to do was to hide in the Girls' Room and smoke until the tenth grade was over with.

It was in the Girls' Room that first week I arrived at high school where I met Franny Blossom, smoking Kents.

“How can you smoke Kents?” I asked. “I mean, in here the smoke is so thick already it's like smoking Pall Malls anyway, how can you even taste Kents?”

She said, “Maybe I should smoke two.”

Franny and I became friends that night when we smoked thousands of cigarettes and drank gallons of coffee and told each other everything in a coffee shop called Norm's on Sunset and Vine.

“I just moved to Hollywood,” Franny said, “because before my father lost everything by being so drunk, we lived in Bel Air and you should have seen our peacocks. I went to a private school. Everybody was so rich. But now we're not.”

“Golly,” I said.

“My father drinks. Do you like Dexedrine? Here.” She dropped about forty or fifty large Dexamyls into my purse so we never shut up for days.

“My mother was a cowgirl singing in a trio like a vaudeville act and my father was a holy roller missionary on his way to South America when he met my mother and fell from grace. He became a sinner when he and my mother got married. Because she made him leave the church and get rich. So now he drinks.”

“Gee,” I said, “it's just like Tennessee Williams, you're so lucky.”

The day Franny took me to the house her parents owned when they moved out of Bel Air to Hollywood, I realized that I had never been up in that part of the Hollywood Hills before except once when I'd gone to a birthday party for the daughter of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans who sat next to me in school, and her house was a gigantic mansion.

But Franny's house had fourteen rooms and was just as gigantic to me, and it was all stucco and Spanish enamel tile and a cracked tennis court where Franny parked her old Cadillac ('52). (She was one of the few girls in school who even had a car.) The wishing well had a goldfish in it and the fountains even worked and there were four fireplaces, six bedrooms, and even a separate guest house with two stories and a bar.

There was a trellis with wisteria hanging from it, too.

I had met people like Franny's parents—people who drank Scotch with ice cubes—because kids I went to school with always seemed to have parents like that to spoil their childhood, but Franny's mother was different. And she didn't mind me either.

A lot of kids had parents who did mind me, so I could tell the difference.

When Franny and I began hanging around together in high school one of the best things about it was that we wore the same size and both were blond so we lived in and out of each other's purses practically as far as lipstick and mascara went since everything that looked okay on me did on her, too.

Of course I was more accessibly cute-looking to guys at first glance but once you saw her on stage when she lit up like the tail of a comet sprinkling across a galaxy in the night skies, people couldn't stand to look at anything else.

The first time I saw Franny act, rehearsing for a scene for her class, we were in her living room of that mansion she hated and I loved, doing the last scene from
Gigi
where she
tells the worldly suitor who wants to make her his mistress that she'll do it only if he says he doesn't love her because how could he love her if he sees the kind of life he'll be letting her in for. Of course any actress who plays this part has to A) convince you she's so adorable that she can make mincemeat out of the Marquis de Sade, and B)convince you that she's so perversely logical that she'd rather be with someone who doesn't love her than a man who does as a mistress. And C), she also has to convince you she's totally
right
—and Franny did all of these things,
plus
at the same time there was a sort of detached laughter of another, wiser woman hanging over the entire idea of people who believed actors on the stage.

“You know, Franny, you really are a star,” I said, one night driving home from Kelbo's.

“No, I'm not,” she said. “If I were we'd move back to Bel Air.”

“And leave that house,” I cried, “but I love that house.”

“You do?” she said frowning as she thought about all that revolting wisteria. “Well,” she added,
“chacun à son gout,
I suppose.”

The truth was, I couldn't act at all, because anytime I had to say someone else's words, they turned into marshmallows sticking my mouth into lumpy resistance, refusing to blithely tumble into the air like they should even in Beckett and not just Shakespeare or Noel Coward, for whenever I had to speak anyone else's words I put up a fight.
My
words, I deep down thought, were just as brilliant and original as theirs
(more
original in fact, since everybody had
heard
their words, whereas they were just finding out mine that very moment). I was just a lousy actress, in other words.

And yet whenever people saw the two of us together, people in those days always were determined to make me into a star and they refused to even give Franny a screen test. They had never seen her in scenes for her acting class the way I
had one day, doing a scene from
Saint Joan
and then singing “I'm Just a Girl Who Cain't Say No” for an encore.

Suddenly, when I met Franny, instead of having to survive the onslaught of those sorority sisters and try not to notice at Hollywood High, I became immersed in a kind of Sunset Strip-Beverly Hills world of actors, acting classes, little theater productions, metallic-green Cadillac convertibles, the clap, and drinks.

The first night Franny took me to Kelbo's, I'd never had a drink in a bar before because I was only fifteen and the law in California was that you couldn't drink unless you were twenty-one—and they meant it sincerely. Of course, Franny and I had gone down to Japan Town and bought sake in liquor stores because she figured that if white people couldn't tell how old Japanese people were, then they wouldn't know we were underage either, and she'd been right too—but drinking like an ultra-sophisticated woman with a cigarette holder and fake eyelashes sitting at a bar was beyond my wildest dreams before Franny took me to Kelbo's.

Kelbo's is still a tropical rum drink place in West L.A. on Pico and is famous for rum drinks but when Franny and I went there, the bartender was her own private Uncle George, who wasn't really her uncle at all but the man who'd been about to marry her mother when she ran off to San Pedro to marry the missionary, and Uncle George—who had been a “friend of the family” ever since—served us anything we wanted.

“But wasn't Uncle George jealous when your mother married your father?” I asked.

“By then, he was my father's best friend,” Franny explained. “In fact, when my mother and father were married, Uncle George was my father's best man.”

“God,” I sighed green with envy, “just like Tennessee Williams all the time.”

Uncle George had invented a special drink just for Franny called Heartbreak made out of champagne and framboise and grenadine which I thought was divine because it was cerise but Franny took one sip and frowned.

“This isn't a drink,” she cried, “there's no alcohol in this!”

“What do you mean, champagne isn't a drink?” Uncle George said.

“Come on,” Franny said, “what did you serve my mother last time? Something with rum in it? Something that's a drink!”

“Oh, okay,” he said.

He returned with a tray on which a large ugly soup dish was supported by three barbaric-looking Tahitians made out of brown ceramic glaze. Inside the dish were floating ice cubes and lots of murky absinthe-looking liquid and on top were two gardenias like a lily pond.

“What's this?” Franny asked, her eyes widening with joy.

“It's called a Vicious Virgin,” he said. “I just invented it.”

Franny sipped it out of a straw which was nearly drowning in the lake.

She sighed, closing her eyes.

I took a sip too, it tasted like sharp lemonade.

“It's two kinds of brandy, five kinds of rum, and K rations of lemonade,” he said.

By the time we'd gotten a quarter of the way through, we were feeling seasick. Before we could drive home, we both had to throw up for half an hour. The place was great.

· · ·

“You'll never get into UCLA with those grades,” Miss Karl of Hollywood High would say before I even sat down.

“Yes, I know,” I replied.

“I'm Miss Karl,” she now said, “sit down there. Facing me. I'm terribly worried about your future. And so should you be. That's what we're here to discuss.”

Well, I was not about to discuss my decadent ideas about
how great it would be once I finally got out of school with a high school diploma with someone I'd never seen before in my life. Someone wearing a Kelly green scarf next to her face, making herself look dead.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“It's your attitude,” she said, “you've no enthusiasm. No clearcut view of your life. No aims, no goals. You don't even have a major.”

“Maybe Spanish?”

“You've got to have more of a plan in mind for where you want to be in five years, ten . . . ,” she said.

“But I thought majoring in Spanish was okay,” I said, confused.

“You haven't even taken shorthand, just typing,” she said. “What good is typing, if you get a job in an office you're going to need more than that.”

“My homeroom teacher told me I could get my major changed to Spanish even though I started with French and changed my mind,” I pleaded.