L.A.WOMAN (19 page)

“Is that Suzannah a friend of yours,” a man wanted to know, “or what?”

The minute a check arrived from the record companies I'd leave enough for my rent and spend the rest instantly having a party. Of course I was always broke. And I got broker. And broker.

“What you need is some man—” women explained.

“Some
man!”
I cried. “What for?”

“To pay for everything,” one older woman explained.

“But I'd be too depressed to
buy
anything,” I said.

“Some older man,” she went on, ignoring my seeming disinterest, “. . . with money, who thinks everything you do is okay. And doesn't mind you.”

“But all men mind me!” I tried to explain, since they all did. “No guy's going to just sit there reading a book while I'm off someplace far enough to spend his money in peace. I'm too easily led astray. This guy would have to not mind philandering if he was just so great—and I know this guy isn't that great.”

“Well,” she said, “what are you going to do?”

“Do?”

It still confused people that I was practically twenty-six years old and they had no firm picture of my life, which I
didn't either except that lately I knew enough to wake up and take as many pictures everyday as I could before Suzannah and I went out looking for trouble (which by then we'd practiced looking for too long not to find every last drop). During the day, though, my photographs were all I believed I was doing, so I did have some firm picture of what I did and just so long as I took firm pictures myself, I was being an artist—and I didn't need to know anything more about my life—and even if it was a horrible way to make money, starving was what artists did.

I wasn't starving, because practically everybody I knew had an expense account, and the only thing I spent money on besides parties and rent and the phone was film which wasn't cheap and printing film which wasn't even cheaper. Of course, if worse came to worse, there were always men; men always seemed made out of money to me. I looked upon men, in those days, as people who'd never miss my incredibly reasonable fifty dollars for cabfare which was much too cheap to make me feel like a hooker. (But then being a hooker seemed more like a good idea every day. Especially at the Beverly Hills Hotel. In fact, being a hooker seemed a far more brilliant idea than having to really get married and breaking my spirit completely. Even when I was ten years old before I even heard of Sam, it seemed obvious to me that getting all dressed up in slinky clothes and being out every night and having men pay you was much more brilliant than getting stuck doing dishes at home every night with nobody to talk to except
him
—and since I already seemed to be wearing slinky clothes and going out every night anyway, it sometimes seemed such a shame to call myself a photographer.)

In fact, by then I knew I was getting too old to be a record album photographer. I was losing my groupie touch and had begun telling rock'n'roll stars I hated rock'n'roll and nobody is that cute. “I wonder what happens to grown men when
they get to be thirty and all they know how to do is rock'n'roll,” I started to wonder out loud.

“Great,” Sheila the Botticelli sighed, “here's a knife, if you want to slit your throat just go ahead. But
do
it! Just get the good part over with where I can watch. There's Jim, why don't you ask him what he's going to do when he's thirty. But then he's not going to live that long. . . .”

We were sitting against the wall in the Troubador Bar and Sheila and I were having double margaritas on the rocks and I was already on my fourth so the room had blended into everybody there and we were all one except Jim who saw me and the one-arm bandit in his head was pulled into compute and he opened both eyes which were the same color and leveled out into equal hopelessness which seemed as close to the jackpot as his eyes ever came and suddenly the rest of his face was alive.

And he smiled.

In fact, he smiled and made his way toward me through the bar even though he was torn from groupies the whole fifteen feet by the time he got to us, and he politely mumbled if he could sit down and I had the chair under him in time to break his fall.

“My God, Jim,
what
are you drinking?” I asked.

“Uh hi,” he said, blending into the bar for a moment before fading away again.

“Jim, go
home!”
I suggested. “You're just making yourself look like a ridiculous rock star to get publicity. And you're
too old
for this!”

But suddenly I realized that I was a year older and suddenly I realized that I couldn't love Jim like this—it was too expensive.

Suddenly I realized everyone
was
too old for the way we were behaving. And for a moment it was like a nasty shock that you couldn't get over because it was true—everybody at our corner was at least twenty-five and they all knew it was
too old. But across the room I saw two boys who didn't look too old to me after all because they looked too young and callow but anything was better I thought than my table and as I lurched to my feet I said, “Anything's better than you guys.”

“Take your knife,” Sheila suggested, but I was really beginning to think Sheila had lost her sense of humor, the things she was always talking about: knives—my wrecked career—killing myself every time I opened my mouth—it was so boring trying to have a rational conversation anymore, my God.

“Hi,” I slyly floated into new blood.

“Well hello!”
one said, making it sound as though
he
was trying to pick
me
up instead of the other way around—out of politeness.

“Hi,” the second innocent young man also said, “you want to sit down?”

“Let's,” I decided, wedging in between them at the bar and being offered the one barstool left at the too-crowded bar.

Their names were Glen and J.D. they said, and I said, “Mine's Sophie Lubin.”

“The
Sophie Lubin.” Glen's eyes suddenly widened in awe.

“The
Sophie Lubin?” I asked. “Who's that?”

“Oh,” J.D. said, “we thought you were the Sophie Lubin who designs album covers—you know, the one who takes pictures, who's famous—but you have almost exactly the same-sounding name, so we thought you were
the
Sophie Lubin!”

“And when we make our first album, she's who we're gonna get,” Glen proudly added. “She's the
best.”

In my opinion, the only way my album covers ever worked was by my being a groupie and blazing with tenderness over
what idols my idols were and for me to regard Glen and J.D. as anything but sensible young men with taste enough to idolize
me
was too much to ask.

In fact, at twenty-seven everything I did was rejected and I lived on kill fees—one third of their usual three hundred or five hundred dollars, when they shouldn't pay you anything. Kill fees seem almost too kind.

I decided to put off being a hooker just until it turned out I couldn't write either even though everybody always said my letters showed how talented I could be if I tried—art directors rejecting my work
especially
advised me to be a writer. Since I was eight I always knew I'd be a writer if all else failed.

(And once
that
failed, I'd always wanted to be a hooker too. There were plenty of things I could do.)

E
VERYTHING
I
'VE ALWAYS HEARD
about Geminis reminds me of me—mercurial, dualistic, schizy. But I'm actually a Taurus and they're supposed to be bovine, stubborn, and single-minded. So you can see what a strain it always was for me since I was all these things: dualistic and single-minded. But as Gandhi once said, “I'd rather be right than consistent.”

I sent Franny a screenplay in Rome (which took me a year to write but it was something to do while I was waiting for checks from record companies), it seemed like
fun.
So when Ed sent me a check for five thousand dollars which he said was an “option,” you could have knocked me over with a feather. But I was always lucky.

“Don't show this to anyone else,” Ed explained in person, when he and Franny flew in from Colorado looking like Ivory Soap commercials, in spite of all their suede and ermine-lined gloves.

“Ed's so paranoid,” Franny said, “he's afraid somebody's going to steal your idea.”

“Idea? It's just the cheapest thing to shoot, that's all, a love story—except instead of boy meets girl, loses girl, gets girl—it's boy gets girl, loses girl. Girl gets better boy. And original boy dies.”

(It was a sort of rough artistic license version of Lola and Sam and Luther.)

“I know, but it's a comedy,” Franny said, “it's never been done before, a bedroom farce where the hero blows it so badly no one will miss him.”

“What do you
mean,
comedy!” I cried. “Not
miss
him?
That's
not how to make a martini!”

“What?”

“You know, that joke about martinis,” I said, “how this guy tries to make a martini only there's always somebody looking over his shoulder telling him more vermouth or less lemon peel, so finally he flies to Arabia and rents a camel and rides out into the desert for a day and a half till finally there's no one as far as the eye can see—and he gets down off the camel, takes out the gin, the vermouth, the ice cubes, the shaker, the glass, and just as he's measuring the vermouth, this voice from God booms out:
‘That's
not how to make a martini.' ”

“So?” Franny wondered. “What's that got to do with anything?”

“Oh nothing,” I said, not wanting to sound like a writer saying, “That's not what my screenplay's about!” just because I'd accidentally been mistaken for one after all I'd done was write something—-I mean any minute it seemed I might be blurting something like “Producers are all assholes” if I didn't look out and turn into one of those ridiculous people for good, which scared me so much I almost forgot it was July and the five thousand dollars had doubled my income for the whole year—at least so far. I
calmed down. I mean, I realized that I didn't have to be consistent and behave like a writer just because they were right. In fact, nobody could tell me I was bovine and stubborn when I was obviously split like the schiziest Gemini all over the place, because now not only did I have to seem so accidentally spontaneous nobody would suspect I was trying to be good, I also had to trick myself into writing without being a writer. On the other hand, I got an agent.

A friend of Ed's named Nan Kamp.

· · ·

Even though whenever my latest car, a '57 Plymouth station wagon, stopped it had a death rattle, I picked up Franny in front of the sweeping grandeur of the Beverly Hills Hotel because I figured I was rich enough not to have to
look
rich once Ed made a deal with Paramount so we could all go to the seashore.

“You wanna go to Kelbo's?” Franny asked. “It's dark.”

Before, we used to have to go dark places when we didn't want anyone to notice we were fifteen. Now we were old enough, only Franny was a star and you couldn't take her anywhere people didn't notice except if it was pitch black.

“Why don't you fucking go incognito?” I complained. “No wonder everyone notices when you have that mouth with you. Couldn't you eat popsicles in public?”

“They melt,” she explained, “and turn my tongue raspberry.”

Inside Kelbo's we got our usual table and were lost in gloom like we were when we were vicious virgins—only we ordered champagne since Uncle George no longer made Vicious Virgins anymore after he got busted.

“Before the champagne arrives,” Franny said, “let's get the house out of the way.”

“House?”

“You know, my old house—the one I owe you for making me a star.”

“The one with the wisteria and the fourteen rooms and the fountains that even worked and the cracked tennis court?” I asked.

“Yes, here are the keys,” she said, “and this envelope, be careful with because it's got all the deed stuff from the real estate lady in it.”

She handed me keys and a large brown envelope.

“But Franny,” I said, “I didn't make you a star, you already
were
a star only nobody knew.”

“Ahhh, champagne,” she sighed, as our waiter poured us two glasses. She lifted hers in a toast and I was dumbfounded but lifted mine anyway.

“But what about your parents?” I asked.

“I got our old house back in Bel Air and they're home,” she said. “Now let's toast . . . to—”

“But I didn't make you a star,
Ed
made you a star,” I said.

“He had no choice,” she said. “When you stood him up in Rome, the wardrobe was already finished and he
had
to find someone the same size right away—I had the only tits big enough.”

“Oh,” I said, “in that case, we earned it.”

“Let's toast something deserving,” Franny said, “to . . .”

“. . . tits,” I suggested, since she seemed stumped.

“To tits,” she agreed, clinking her glass to mine. We sipped.

“Can I have your autograph?” someone lost in the gloom wondered.

We never even got to finish one glass.

“On the other hand,” I said, “we could drink to all the tits we want at my parents' house—let's get some champagne To Go.”

When we got there, we paused for a moment on the balcony overlooking the living room (which still had beebee holes in it from Franny's father shooting the brass Liberty Bell), and Franny said, “God, this place is so big, everybody in L.A. could sit down.”