L.A.WOMAN (20 page)

“Yeah,” I said, “once we get chairs.”

We turned on the fountains, which still worked, and toasted each room, eating pineapple guavas from a tree I hadn't seen there before, until we ended up at twilight in the dining room.

“Maybe I can find that rose wallpaper and make this place look more like home for their homecoming present,” I said.

“Oh look,” Franny said. “She's still there.”

From where we stood, we could see all the way to the top of the Taft Building at Hollywood and Vine where the Millers Beer sign had just gone on—with the lady swinging from the moon to and fro, to and fro, while neon stars twinkled on and off, on and off. Of course most nights you can't see real stars over L.A. because it's too misty, but I had seen those from my bedroom window when I was little so I knew what authentic stars were like—and even then I always liked ours better.

Lola and Luther had come down for my parents' homecoming party and the house was filled with requited sweet-peas even though it was the hottest day of the year in the wrong month—June. Everything trembled like babies' fingernails before the guests came and my mother looked like being back in Hollywood at last filled her with the pink light she liked to breathe in.

My father now looked like Einstein played by Leslie Howard and he was playing the violin in the middle of the living room while my grandmother (who stopped minding my mother soon after the scissors incident) and Goldie kept avoiding him to put more glasses on the coffee table.

Bonnie had veered into L.A. from New York where being
the white sheep of the family was no longer an embarrassment since she was a union organizer like my grandfather and had found a station in life which fit in with something we understood.

Ophelia was married to a jazz musician named Art with black wavy hair and that slightly blast-off look in his eyes.

Even my Japanese girl friend from junior high, Ollie, was there.

And I was wearing my Miss Niagara Falls sequined thing that the lady in the antique store said belonged to Marlene Dietrich and was seven hundred dollars in the Depression because each and every sequin was sewn on by hand and the thing shot light out like one of those mirrored chandeliers. Of course you couldn't sit down in it or the sequins all went at right angles to your ass but until I sat down I didn't know that.

Here I was just two years beyond twenty-six when no one knew why I wasn't married, and now Harry and Ed were coming, so in case anybody like my Aunt Lily wanted to persuade me to become a physical therapist again or my friend Frank got frantic trying to talk me into becoming a computer programmer or Francie, who kept on about the older man who wouldn't mind me, came by, I could always find at least one person to vouch for my obsessions paying off.

But then even if they hadn't, I realized, I wouldn't love my obsessions any less.

And Lola and I went for a walk up Canyon Drive to stand in front of her old house hanging on a hill almost invisible from evergreen branches and I didn't love
her
obsessions any less either.

“But why did you marry him?” I began.

“Because really I had nothing else to do,” she said.

“I left New York, my boyfriend there was very cute, but not smart enough,” she said—we both looked up to the top of this ancient tree which her mother must have
planted—“and when I came back to L.A. he was waiting for me. He wouldn't get off my front porch. He was crazy about me and he wouldn't leave me alone. And I had nothing else to do.”

“You didn't?” I asked.

“I didn't know what to do with myself if I wasn't a dancer,” she said, “and there I was getting older. There wasn't anything else I could do.”

“But God, Lola, those
guys. . . .”

“I
know,
those guys!” she said. “But you should have seen the
others!”

“My father at least let my mother have fun,” I said, “all the others picked them off like candles with a snuffer.”

“Your father only plays Bach!”

“You know I have brains enough for two, if a guy lets you have fun why should he play anything or have any brains anyway—and all they do when they're smart is
suffer”

“But not as much as you suffer,” she said, “but I suppose that's why they're smart.”

“You know my father used to listen to those guys like Sam and he'd go around for a month saying how remarkable it was that there were no great women artists.”

“Oi gevalt”
Lola said.

“Only then, we were on our way to Sante Fe and he takes us sixty miles out of our way and takes us to go see Georgia O'Keeffe in the middle of nowhere because she's so great.”

“You don't say.”

“I was twelve, my God, was that like a bolt of something that worked.”

“Her work is beautiful.”

“But you know I used to wander down Hollywood Boulevard hoping that Georgia O'Keeffe wasn't really just a man by accident because she was the only woman artist, period, but then, you know, I told my mother, and she told me Marilyn Monroe was an artist and not to worry. And so I realized she was right and didn't.”

“My favorite was Marlene, oooooo, what a face,” Lola said (she looked like Marlene more every day).

“But
why
did you marry Sam?” I wondered.

“Because I had nothing else to do.”

· · ·

My grandmother from Kiev had a genius for changing her mind.

One minute Goldie was a child prodigy too talented to do anything but dance, the next Goldie was like a knife in her mother's heart still not married and twenty already.

Or one minute all my father's high school friends were angels and “smart too,” and the next they were “peasants.”

Of course she was so engaging during Part I that she had to be right during Part II as well and it was through rude awakenings that you were putty in her hands.

“She must have hated Sam,” I said to my father, that day at the party after my walk with Lola.

“Oh, no,” he quickly replied, “Sam she couldn't hate because he was too beautiful.”

“Too beautiful!” I exclaimed. “Nobody told me he was
that
beautiful. If Grandma couldn't hate him, he really did something to people, didn't he?”

(I mean, beauty was the only thing my grandmother couldn't see through. But then I had the same blind spot myself.)

“Oh yes,” my father said, “he was quite an attractive person.”

“All I thought was that people were so stupid they let Sam be mean to them for no reason. I had no idea he was quite
that
attractive a person.”

“Yeah,” my father signed, “but it must have been his eyes.”

Of course it wasn't his eyes, it was
him.
Now that I knew he was beautiful his eyes fell into place, for it all made sense to have people relishing lavender eyes if they were trying to
explain the mystery of what he did and turn him into words like a story. But details like eyes and how mean he was to Lola were only the subplot—the main thing was that he was too beautiful for Grandma to change her mind. And
that
was beautiful.

People who saw Franny's old house after my parents moved back to L.A. thought it was our original old house sometimes and I myself sort of melded them together in time too.

I still lived in the apartment on Martel because I lived exactly where it was perfect and money had nothing to do with it; in fact writing screenplays was okay but there was something to be said for developing pictures all day long too. Plus people knew where to come if I had parties.

I think the thing everybody decided was wrong about Hollywood—the trance people seemed to live in—was really the most necessary ingredient running everything. That Neptunian blur was what made L.A. great and that Aimee Semple McPherson suspension of disbelief along with the ether mystics was really what brought movie stars to life. There is a sort of cocoon around L.A. that compelled compassion out of skeptics, but of course movies were so gigantic that everyone knew how great they were trying to be and felt sorry for them when they weren't. At least in the beginning, until the fifties, but how can you be great in color? It took Fellini to be great in color. Of course the city of Los Angeles itself scattered into the one-story horizon somehow made people wonder how seamless stories of splendid aristocracy in palaces could come from the trackless waste—but everybody who really lived in L.A. was linked into the trance. Everybody knew certain boulders were fake and they knew why.

The fake boulders and the compassion and women dancing in Grecian togas came out of the same trance too—the
trance of irrevocable loss—because whatever it was, it was only a movie.

But at least movies were work.

The sky over L.A. is as flat horizontally as Africa, an Italian once told me, and he felt nervous in L.A. thinking the whole place might crack on his head. But the feeling in L.A. that the place was not safe—that hovering earthquake in the air—was why anyone in the trance even came down long enough to learn to thread a camera at all. They had to take their eye off what was probably the apocalypse and invent Theda Bara out of a girl from Cincinnati to make sense out of the light.

The world was wide open from 1916 on when too many girls were already in Hollywood, and although virgins were warned not to come to L.A., anything was better than Sour Lake. No matter what they say about the bluebird of happiness, it was not in anyone's backyard in 1933 in Texas.

Somehow the trance escaped men of vision when they wrote about L.A., because nothing struck them as wonderful about a whole town where all the girls were too beautiful and too preoccupied to do anything but work. These girls struck men as victims of Hollywood since marriage slipped their minds completely as an idea of something to do.

But even the girls who failed abysmally weren't sorry since they were part of the Big Trance of what was wrong in L.A. with the women.

I myself have never been one of those people who are so great that Hollywood destroys them. I knew we were all in the same boat the whole time rewriting that damn script, and since it was probably the
Titanic
it was just as well to be polite. Anyway, when I began with Ed and Franny at Paramount every day like they must have done before I was born when my mother said “Hollywood was Hollywood,” being there was awe-inspiring enough to keep me sedated. We were inside the empire and everybody knew it.

It was what we have to remind us of Hollywood when it was wide open.

When I left Rome, of course, the inside of studios slipped from my grasp but Franny became so adept at dubbing seven or eight voices and her own, and Mitchell Craven was himself so much better than anyone else in Italy, that Ed was back in L.A. trying to talk me back into acting like love was blind or something. They all three became hot and never stopped working for one minute—always freezing or frying on some location being great during the day.

But then movies are the holy commitment people making them jump into although nobody working on a movie ever left for work before 3:00
A.M. SO
far as Franny ever heard. But usually 5:00
A.M
. is when they start their cars in the darkness and smooth their way down Melrose in the silence. They stay there all day, waiting endlessly in the trance suspended in time, and they slip back out at twilight for a straightforward dinner and 10:00 is as late as anyone can stay awake. It's a huge tradition as devious as the Vatican and as clear as light, but they aren't going anywhere without a script so I was glad I had one.

Suddenly our particular trance turned into a monarch butterfly and everybody knew just how to make it look real. Though irrevocable loss did cling since it was only a movie.

By that time I figured maybe twenty-eight was not too old. But then there's no place like the studios to make you feel innocent by comparison.

And in the meantime Harry came out of
his
trance on the East Coast and flew into L.A. about this show he suddenly dragged me out of the studio all day and all night to do.

I couldn't believe it sitting there in my apartment when Sheila called about how Jim died in Paris. It took me two years not to see him coming around corners the way he always did, and in Barney's there was so much of him in the air.

But gradually the line he drew became too perfect not to have ended in Paris and I saw that his life could be over since it was, after all, his life and not mine. I had never liked being the subject of my art in person since actors must act, even if it kills them.

Of course normal people will think that art can be taken too far, but the trouble with being normal is it stops you from being great. And Jim knew exactly what great was.

But you know, if he'd seen Paramount, he might have been great another fifty years and never come down once.

And I wanted to take him to meet my parents, their house was right up from the Vedanta Temple north of Vine. And we could have gone into the Hollywood Cemetery in back of Paramount where my Great Aunt Golda from Kiev in her urn can look out at the painted sky overhanging the back lot. We could go look at Rudolph Valentino's crypt and think about how long it's been since the words “Must I be valet as well as lover” made Lola come for the first time.

If only the next people who decided to have a war would stay home and make a movie instead, it would be just as expensive and beyond human control, but by the time you got sick of it, you could go home.

Anyway, if you can't be Marilyn Monroe there might be something else you can do. And if a girl in blue could leave Sour Lake, Texas, simply to be around movies when Hollywood was Hollywood, then just being an L.A. woman, if you ask me, was always what Hollywood did best.

EVE BABITZ
is the author of
Eve's Hollywood, Slow Days, Fast Company, Sex and Rage, and Two by Two.
She has also written for
Rolling Stone, Vogue, Esquire,
and
Cosmopolitan.