Vanished Years (11 page)

O
n the way to the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel is a strange little basement coffee shop, a hangover from the old days. It’s a thin low bar – a large cupboard really, tucked behind a staircase – with ten high stools against a counter. A TV blares in the corner above the coffee machine. Waitresses in great nylon outfits make and serve the food in one endless movement back and forth behind the counter, crackling with electricity as they squeeze past each other to pour the coffee, flip the eggs and take the orders. They are observed – sometimes lustfully – by a row of locals rather than guests, hags and rats from the seventies, who clamber with difficulty onto their stools and know the girls and each other by name. The whole place is something that Hollywood no longer is, which is cheerful. It’s Louis B rather than Mel B.

I am sitting on a bar stool next to a couple of my favourite octogenarian girlfriends in headscarves and trouser suits, having waffles, when suddenly all transmission stops on the TV for an emergency statement from the White House.

Corky clutches Gladys’s arm.

‘It’s war!’ she rasps.

‘You’re hurting me,’ squeals Gladys, flapping her off.

There is a sudden hush in the coffee shop as all heads fix the TV with startled eyes. This is the moment we have all been waiting for. Even the waitresses freeze. On the screen, double doors open onto that corridor of ultimate power and Tony Blair and George Bush saunter to their podiums. There might as well be a trumpet voluntary. This is extreme entertainment. Our two leaders proceed to casually write off the United Nations, and declare that soon we shall be at war. Corky, who claims to be psychic and has a spirit guide called the Gypsy, has already declared that Bush is going to save the world.

‘We gotta do it,’ she says, shaking her head at the screen.

‘You’re crazy, Corky. You don’t know anything. Focus on your area of expertise, my dear. Who’d be better in the sack? George or Tony?’ asks Gladys, elbowing me in the ribs and winking, while Corky stares enraptured as Bush squints at his autocue.

‘How do I know? I am no longer interesting in these things,’ she says.

‘You’re the clairvoyant, my dear.’

I met Corky – short for Cora – a couple of years ago over breakfast in the coffee shop. She is a Nicaraguan refugee via Cuba with a thick impenetrable accent and a face that has been ravaged by ‘the four S’s, baby: Sandinistas, surgery, sun and sin’. As a result she looks like the plate that ran away with the spoon. She has tiny humorous eyes like raisins, a flat reorganised nose over a pair of gigantic lips in a face as large and round as a beach ball. She is probably seventy-five years old but no one knows for sure. I have never quite got to the bottom of what she has actually spent her life doing but, like Graham Greene’s Aunt Augusta, it seems to have involved a lot of touring.

Her sidekick, the indomitable Gladys, is a strawberry blonde of seventy-eight, married to a producer who ‘lost his marbles, honey. I
had to put him away!’ His name is Maudy and he lives at a home in Encina, while Gladys lives next door to Elsa.

I see Corky a few times, over the course of a couple of years, before we actually speak. She is tall and shapely with an amazing arse and large conical breasts. She is always leaving the bar as I come in. Soon we are saying hello and goodbye but nothing more until one day she turns at the door.

‘It seems like we’re always saying goodbye,’ she says with eyes like slits and a Monroe pout.

‘Elizabeth Taylor in
A Place in the Sun
!’ I reply without thinking.

‘Aiee,’ she screams and rushes back in. ‘I love that film.’

I quickly discover that much of what she says is lifted from the movies, but there is something enormously warm and true about her, even though she is, as she says herself, ‘a fake. But a
yeal
fake.’ (
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
.) Now, two years later, she is my first visitor when I arrive in LA. She swings into the hotel driveway in an old white Rolls-Royce, which she manoeuvres like a bumper car.

‘Aiee!’ Crash. ‘Sorry,’ she shrieks to the boy who parks the car. ‘I am a poor yeff-you-hee’ (refugee).

‘Way to go, Corky.’ He laughs.

‘I been a long way,’ she answers, winking.

Normally we meet in the coffee shop but sometimes she whisks me off to her bungalow in Beverly Glen where she lives with three dogs and ‘the Gringo’, a large cockatoo who does a brilliant impersonation of his mistress’s answering machine: ‘Hellooo. Leeve your mesaage, please.’ This bungalow is a throwback to a humbler Hollywood long gone. Built in the sixties, custard coloured, it has dog-eared plastic awnings over all the windows. They stick out like old yellow teeth, and the windows beneath them are dark open mouths covered with ripped mosquito nets. The house is shrouded in shadow on the side of a hill under a roof of towering eucalyptus trees. There is an empty liver-shaped pool in the garden. One of Corky’s dogs once drowned in it and it has never been refilled, although there are always plans.

She has a coterie of ancient girlfriends – other refugees from all the various South American coups and counter-coups that exploded across that continent after the war. These ladies gather at her house in the evenings for prayer and plantains. They are all deeply religious and superstitious. Corky is a Madrina (from her days as a croupier in Havana), which in Cuban voodoo, called Brouharia, is a kind of witch doctor. Her spirit guide, the Gypsy, speaks through her and sometimes sends her out of control.

‘The Yipsy is drivin’ me cazy today. Oy, Roopi!’

On these days Corky nibbles a Xanex and puts her feet up.

‘We would like to clean you,’ she tells me, climbing off her bar stool.

‘Clean me? Why? Am I dirty?’

‘Veery slightly.’ She smiles, batting her raisin eyes. ‘So that everything yun smoothy for Señor Ambassador! Miguelina – you hear me mention her – is over wisitin’ her cousin. She is vey good! Come to my place tonight.’

It is one of those wet Februarys, and water gushes down the steep streets, tumbling into the drains and dragging the odd tiny old lady into the sewers. There is a cold front and the rain beats down on the deserted streets as I park outside Corky’s house. Lights twinkle inside and Corky’s shadow – conical tits and curvaceous hips – crosses behind a blinded window. The trees groan in the wind. In the kitchen a little round Indian lady in a tracksuit sits at the table reading the cards for Gladys, who is crying.

‘What’s wrong?’ I ask.

‘Hey, baby. Miguelina says Maudy can’t last much longer.’

‘It’s better that way,’ says Corky.

Miguelina looks at me guiltily and breaks into a large toothless smile. She rattles off in Spanish to Elsa and the two of them laugh and high-five each other. It’s slightly disconcerting. I can tell the Gypsy is around because Corky is acting weird and wild like Marlene in
A Touch of Evil
. Gladys looks at me and raises her eyebrows.

Miguelina – who has come all the way from the Dominican Republic – strips me to my underwear, observed by Corky and Gladys, and submerges me in a bath full of flowers and herbs, standing over me, humming and singing. It’s quite a tight squeeze in the tiny bathroom, lit by candles. The three women lean over me and I start to get the giggles. The wind rattles on the windows. ‘I feel as if I’m in
Rosemary’s Baby
.’

‘Except that we are good witches, baby,’ laughs Gladys.

After the bath Miguelina leads me in to the middle of the sitting room, dripping, half naked, and stares at me while the other ladies light more candles and hang giant oversized rosaries around their necks. We all stand there in silence for a long moment. The only noise is the rain and my racing heart. Gladys and Corky begin to move slowly around the room, murmuring and swatting at the air, as if unseen energies have arrived from another dimension. The hair stands up on the back of my neck. It suddenly feels really scary. The rain beats down on the roof and the eucalyptus trees groan outside and it is suddenly cold. Then Miguelina, who has been looking daggers at me now for at least ten minutes, shrieks and lunges at me. I nearly scream but she puts her hand over my mouth and thrusts her head up close to mine. Her eyes are bulbous and bloodshot.

‘Sshh,’ she whispers and starts rubbing me all over with her hands, grunting and wailing, throwing back her head and laughing maniacally, going through the A to Z of gesture and expression. I think I might get the giggles again because she puts her hand inside my underwear and grabs my cock and tugs at it. My God, she’s going to pull it off. Then she puts her hands right up my bum. After that she places them on my chest, fingers outstretched, nails long and red and gleaming. The other two approach and also put their hands on me. Their moans intensify. They wave and sway. They wield their crucifixes at my face. It is all quite deranged. Miguelina’s eyes disappear in their sockets, she emits a blood-curdling scream and is literally thrown across the room, landing on the sofa.

Corky turns on the lights.

‘That was a good one,’ she says.

‘Hellooo,’ sings the Gringo. ‘Please – leeve – your – mesaage.’

‘Now the sky’s the limit. That’s the message, you silly bird!’ shrieks Corky.

The old ladies make Miguelina comfortable on the sofa and she begins to snore.

Every day I plough over the hill with a heavy heart to the auditions, where endless girls and boys parade their wares for us on tape. It is a cattle market and, as you’ll know if you’ve ever done an audition yourself, it makes you want to jump out of the window. One holds one’s whole life in one’s hands at an audition, offering it up, clothed by the Bard, or Beckett, or by Victor in our case, to the barbarians on the other side of the table. You’ve learnt the scene. You’ve rehearsed it obsessively in class with your scene partner or with your steering wheel as you crawl along in the traffic on the freeway, and now – for five minutes – it is looked at, laughed at and rejected, as often as not, in a process that never gets easier, no matter how good or bad you are. It is the hideous hunger state of being a young actor in Hollywood, from which only a lucky few will ever set sail towards the puffy pink sunset of fame, leaving the rest of them – us – staring out to sea, trapped in that infamous circle of the inferno – the Circle of Auditioning – and going down on … not dick, just tape.

All the girls who come to see us are good. Proficient. Believable, even. But they have no originality. They are all clones of someone else. Their life experience is nil and their emotional language is braille. Some girls do bubbly. Others do neurotic. Some do sultry, but it is Tupperware sex, neatly packed up in clingfilm for a light snack. Many of the girls seem to be fanatically Christian and talk about things like ‘my church’, which everyone on our side of the table seems to be really thrilled about, while I am literally holding my head so that it doesn’t do a three-sixty-degree turn and shriek, ‘Your father sucks cocks in hell!’

‘She’s just not that sexy,’ I whine at one point about a particular seminarian.

‘What do you want? To be raped in the audition?’ snaps Glynn, the casting lady.

‘Some chance! That girl is saving herself for the rapture party.’

‘Don’t you have any beliefs at all?’

‘Belief is very Windows 3,’ I snigger.

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means, dear Cindy, that I have more important things to do with my time than conjure up little fantasies about the future when the present is a big gaping hole because we can’t find an actress!’

Or an actor.

Casting a black actor who is as edgy as, say, Snoop Dogg proves to be impossible. They just don’t exist like that in TV and movies. Despite the fact that there are now some big black stars, America still views black people with some trepidation, and pretty much all the black actors on the scene, from the top to the bottom, strain every nerve to present the wholesome side of being Afro-American. In other words there are no fabulous rough diamonds for hire unless you want to cast the role from the back pages of
Frontiers
magazine (which I would). When one of the guys talking to us says, ‘Oh my golly!’ I nearly fall off my chair. I’ve accepted that we can’t say ‘God’ any more but ‘golly’ is going too far. Besides, they seem to have forgotten that traditionally at the end of ‘golly’ comes ‘wog’. I want to crawl into a hole and die.

However, we do find two great girls and a lovely guy. One of the girls is from Texas and I want her, but the casting ladies think that she is too much like Julia Roberts and so we go for the other who is a sweetheart and good. She is called Megan. The boy we finally land for the role of Trey from the boiler room is really handsome and a very good actor as well, even if he is not genuinely rough.

Rehearsals begin on Monday. The recording of the show is scheduled to take place in nine days’ time – next Wednesday. Derek arrives on the dot of ten, looking the very picture of a theatrical
knight in Hollywood, and my heart briefly leaps. Like Marc he is vaguely dressed for a safari in various shades of biscuit. He is a sweetheart, very warm to everyone, with a little briefcase like a travelling salesman. What must he be thinking, I wonder, as he is taken from group to group around the large trestle table? Everyone bobs and beams. Derek has impeccable manners and chats animatedly to all and sundry. It’s one of the few moments of ‘the process’ I can remember actually enjoying. The fact of Derek actually being there. The joy of watching his English manners – as thorough as a lawn-mower trundling across a garden making hay (nonny no), leaving every blade of grass shorn of all prejudice. Derek is an animated vicar on a prison visit, clutching his script to his chest as he stands over Trey who is sprawled across a chair. I catch his eye and he winks. I can tell exactly what he is thinking. ‘You got me into this. Now get me out!’

Victor surges forward in a phalanx of comedy scribes to greet the English knight. These laughter stooges are an extraordinary breed in the Hollywood food chain, a strange haunted type of after-dark animal. They are often failed stand-ups, prone to crippling depression and drug addiction. These scribes wander from one TV set to another like a weird desert tribe. They leaf through their books of gags with shaky hands and mumbled complaints, and they are actually fabulous scruffy outsiders in the sharp overdressed world of Hollywood. They settle down around their master, trying out jokes on Derek who throws back his head with glee, even though I bet he probably hasn’t got a clue what they’re on about.