Black swans, p.5
Black Swans, page 5
“Don’t spend any time at all,” she said, “with people who don’t love you. If you find yourself being attracted across a crowded room, leave.”
“Who will I see, then?” I wondered.
“See people who like you,” she explained. It was sort of the tango theory, waiting until being asked to dance. Stuff I knew in theory but not practice.
“Hi,” said my friend Janis, whom I hadn’t heard from since last Christmas, “you’re coming, aren’t you?”
“Is it December?” She always had these Christmas parties and I always went, ever since we met the first year I was in L.A.’s vast twelve-step network of high society and low bottoms—she always said, as she did now, “I’m just having a few people over, I swear, no more than thirty.”
“Oh, Janis,” I said, “you know at the last minute you’re going to hit every meeting in town and have to have seven turkeys!”
“I want you to just bring a couple of pies,” she explained.
“What are you wearing?” I asked.
Janis, my most beautiful social friend, was the kind of person I longed to know in high school; she dressed perfectly, she looked adorable, she knew everyone, and she could be a knockout in every way—and for some reason, I got to have her in my later adult life when I could really appreciate how lucky anyone would be to know her. She was even a great painter; her canvases were luminous and elegant and truly major. She was married to a man who appreciated her, and she came from a great old Hollywood family with a checkered past and lived in a house above and beyond sumptuousness—and she was funny.
“What am I wearing?” she said. “Hell, I’ll scare something up.”
The Christmas before, she’d descended her stairs in red sequins, like the daughter of Hollywood that she was, and though everyone else was dressed within an inch of their lives to the edge of the cliff fashionwise, she was the most a star.
I never knew how she managed to keep track of looking so great while being such a wonderful artist, but she could. To me, it seemed a full-time occupation, knowing where those red-sequined outfits were.
Anyway, I knew her party was in a week, so I set about assembling the most radiant outfit I could, got the pies, and arrived, as always, so early she was still upstairs fighting with her husband over the fact that the thirty people she had promised to keep it down to had again exploded into a wholesale open house for more than two hundred.
I sat downstairs, having delivered my—what now looked like extremely unequal-to-the-occasion—pies to the caterers, who already had eight pies themselves, and anyway, there was no place to put them, and I waited as the room began to fill with beauty, my old friends, the softness, the pillows, the great dining room with silver buffet trays and warming dishes, the scented candles everywhere, the tree that was weighed down with Janis’s own hand-painted decorations, and the fireplaces. Nat “King” Cole singing “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire . . .” lulled everyone into the mood, and Janis’s entrance did the rest. No snow outside, of course, but in L.A. if we want snow, we go to Aspen.
Anyway, it was there, about twenty minutes after I arrived, when most people still hadn’t come yet, that I saw my handsome-devil friend Christopher, who put his huge arms around me and said, “I haven’t seen you . . . since before I went to New York. Where was it, Brian’s? I haven’t seen you since Brian’s, that day, a year ago.”
“Yes,” I said. “God, how lucky we are knowing him.”
“I’ll say,” he said. “Things haven’t been the same since he’s died.”
I stood there, totally stunned, melted, marbleized in sweetness of memory and guilt for having allowed my own trivialities of romantic life to so overwhelm my common decency, my true lovers. The ones who loved me.
Oh, I let Brian go without saying good-bye. Our beautiful, bald, slinky, fabulous Brian!
Brian who made every outing something incredible, like the Sicilian picnics in The Leopard, where servants, silverware, kids, grandparents, coaches, ice, chickens, the whole nine Victorian yards, went on the picnic too.
Everywhere he went came an entourage of people under his spell, people who weighed his every word like a prize above rubies, and Eddie, his darling son, and most of his friends along too. But mostly, he stayed home and the entourage came to him, bringing arms ladened with laundry, for he always encouraged his friends with no washer/dryer to bring their laundry to his house. He was always in the midst of making tea, coffee, cocoa, sponge cakes, cookies, reduced sauces that took days and stock—his stove was enormous; he had two ovens; the show must always go on and on and on. And his consistency was princely.
I felt abandoned. Of course, I had known he had AIDS; everyone died of it then, even if he did point out that “Death is just fear.”
Of course, the men he went to when they were dying had never been sick in their lives, whereas Brian had always been sick, had relatives in vegetable states from alcoholism. He, in that fabulously social embodiment of folly and silliness called life, had run a hospice for the sick and dying in various wings of his large house—they were always there, along with the tomatoes and Puccini. He had even called me once when his favorite old aunt, who didn’t want to die in the hospital, had moved in after having strokes, called me one hot day and said, “You must get in your car and drive to Beverly Hills to pick up this prescription, go now! And bring it here!”
Even though I was maudlin with self-pity over Peter, I had gotten into my car, driven to the pharmacy, seen the pharmacist, who said, “So, she’s finally dying, is she?”
And I’d rushed the pills to his house, only meaning to drop them off, only meaning to be a little loyal, not a lot loyal, but he had put his arm around me and said, “I think you should see this . . .”
He took me upstairs to the wing of death, where three black full-time nurses, who’d been this woman’s guardians for the last few years in her own house, feeding her, taking her to the bathroom, sitting beside her in the night and day, were—Bee, Angie, and Joanna, standing over the dying woman, their hands fluttering darkly over her body—over her torso and face—mumbling, crooning prayer words—brushing against her like little ocean waves, ceaselessly, as though helping her soul to depart; it was as though through their flutter of black hands, her soul could free itself of her body, and it was a terrible mixture of truth, beauty, and intimacy.
“My God,” I said, looking into his sharp green eyes.
“This is how you help people die,” he said.
It was dimly lit, the room, only a small night-light with the white bed, the white uniforms, the white body, and the dark walls, the dark nurses, the heavily draped windows, for outside it was hot and blinding.
It was a sight, a moment, I shall never be free of. That combination of flying to Beverly Hills, getting the pills, racing back in the heat and sunlight—it was in the upper nineties that day, and windy—coming to Brian’s, where it was cool and spacious downstairs in his living room with its stained Morris Louis above the mantel, going up the hushed stairs, down the hall into the dark, cool, crooning/moaning room, watching that woman’s soul leave her body under pink palms. Brian’s arm around me, his green eyes sharply centered on the present, his willingness to be present at any human event, be it wedding, breakfast, tomato harvesting, or death.
“This is how it is,” he said. “Of course, here we do it right.”
He had seen a lot of death, done right and done badly, but in his house, doing things badly never happened.
Did they do it right for him? Was he in a dark room with others who knew how to free souls, with their hands and dark prayers? I didn’t think so. His friends were too innocent. Too afraid, like me; too half-alive. And his friends who were doctors and male nurses and helped others—his old lovers—most of those friends had died of AIDS before him, because by the winter of 1988, practically everyone he knew in San Francisco and L.A. who was gay was dead. The cute ones, in other words, who lived dangerously.
The living, those of us who were at this party, who were left—the heteros so far, the people who’d never used needles, the people who never let an ulcer go to such a point we had fatal blood transfusions—were alive.
The squares, in other words.
We, the squares.
A gay friend told me that San Francisco, even before that earthquake not long ago, was like a battlefield—strewn with ghosts. The hubbub of Castro Street, of the days when anything went, was gone. For a lot of people, the snatching away of these gorgeous men was a side issue, a distant disturbance, a minor tragedy—the great things like the Berlin Wall were what mattered. Tibet, under the Chinese heel out there where nobody could get to it, was welcome to become extinct, to go under, to become ash. For a lot of people, the deaths were a grotesque just desert for all those guys in neat mustaches, suspenders, all that dancing . . . Or for the ones who shot up, who cared?
Such a perishing disease, a disease made out of fear that blew up the dimensions so that death itself was not a noble answer, but merely added insult to injury. Merely more humiliation.
Standing with Christopher at the party, I felt myself crushed from within, and said, “What happened?”
“He died great,” he said. “He was coherent until three days before, and he staged his entire funeral. Everything was planned beforehand. You could feel Brian there, his coffin was warm. First we all met at the church, everyone was there—the whole entourage—hundreds of his friends were there, where were you?”
“Oh, God,” I said.
“At the door, everyone was handed a photograph of Brian—he had hundreds made—in that gorgeous blue shirt he used to wear, dancing? You know, the look on his face?” He laughed, and I remembered Brian dancing; dancing was his brilliant point. “And on the coffin, in the back so we all could see it clearly as it was carried down the aisle, was this bumper sticker that said FREE TIBET.”
“Oh,” I said, “FREE TIBET was Brian!”
“I know,” he said. “Everyone began to laugh. It was Brian winking at us, telling us to have fun. To be alive. To think.”
After that, his body was taken to the rich Catholic cemetery in the old part of L.A. where his family was buried, the bumper sticker still on, and was lowered into the earth, forever. His soul having left the coffin in time to be over at his house where the wake/party took place, where all his friends brought food and told each other Brian stories, and where, after, a more informal gathering took place and everyone danced till dawn.
ALL I HAVE to give—a valentine sent too late, an “I love you, Brian” spoken after the trivialities of my own life had awakened into an empty landscape. The sad Hollywood I’ve returned to without Brian, alone.
Remote, too elevated, and too isolated now, but free to say, at last, good-bye.
Which is as right as I can do it.
All any of us can do now, in fact, is make sure when his son, Eddie, comes down from that school Brian sent him to in Ojai where he went himself, that he has holidays and celebrations he can remember, like at Janis’s. And when he comes down in summer, I take him to the Venice Boardwalk, where we walk along, have lunch, and I listen to him tell me about Brian’s last year, the one I missed, when Brian tried to persuade Eddie to go stay in India with his mother, and he wouldn’t leave.
All I can do is be around in case he needs help in the here and now. He has lots of future to look forward to. And he has Brian’s eyes, casing the horizon for fun.
Self-Enchanted City
I’m so glad Hollywood’s celebrating its one hundredth anniversary and not me. After you’ve been around for about one hundred years, people are bound to notice and draw attention to you (but if I live that long, I hope I have enough money to pay someone at Rogers & Cowan to keep it out of the papers).
Hollywood has always been the last place on earth to shun publicity. What Hollywood seemed to the rest of the world (as opposed to what Hollywood actually was) has been the result of a tornado of fabrication. As George Orwell said, “Fiction is history that didn’t happen and history is fiction that did.”
Hollywood, after all, is the home of those whom silent star Mae Murray called the “self-enchanted.” And having grown up in Hollywood, I’ve known a lot of self-enchanted people. Not since the pharaohs thought they were gods have so many human beings believed that they themselves (and not their publicists or destiny or some larger force) were responsible for the fact that so many other human beings worshiped them.
This has been rather tough on the Hollywood landscape, since self-enchantment requires people to believe that you live in paradise. And thanks to the miracle of celluloid, the millions who worshiped the self-enchanted couldn’t tell whether Theda Bara’s leopard-skin rug was lying in an alabaster palace or in a photographer’s studio. So a lot of Hollywood architecture seems to have been designed to look good in a photograph rather than to keep out the rain.
Not that Hollywood wasn’t really paradise, more or less, at least in my dream version of the 1920s, when it was full of pepper trees and mimosa—the streets filled with red and yellow clouds of fragrance—and when anyone with a nickel could take a red car all the way to the beach.
But for anything beautiful to age gracefully, eternal vigilance is necessary, and Hollywood has not been carefully tended. It has been knocked down flights of stairs, abandoned, left for dead, and sold into slavery. Still, if you ask me, some parts are just as beautiful as my dream version—even more beautiful if you subscribe to the Tennessee Williams decadence-as-poetry theory that ravaged radiance is even better than earnest maintenance.
My favorite part of Hollywood is right where I live, at the foot of Beachwood Canyon below the HOLLYWOOD sign. During the time of the Manson scare, after the Lo Bianco murders (when every woman I knew was afraid to go out alone at night), my friend Sandra stayed too long visiting someone in Beachwood Canyon, so that by the time she left, it was already dark. And she was so afraid on those winding little streets, she got lost. As she turned an especially narrow curve, a hippie-looking guy wearing a headband jumped out in front of the car, waving his hands frantically. “I was so frightened,” she told me later, “I swerved around him and stepped on the gas. Then this second guy with even longer hair jumped out and I really, well . . . I mean, my entire body was just total adrenaline. And I stepped on the gas even harder, came round a bend, and suddenly . . . there I was, right in the middle of a movie.”
Sandra had driven right into a detective film shooting on location, her brakes shrieking, knocking over lights and nearly landing in the buffet. “All I could do was laugh.” Sandra moved to Berkeley soon afterward.
That strange mixture that’s always been a major part of Hollywood—self-enchantment mingled with the ever-present fear of total disaster (earthquakes, fires, random murders)—lies beneath the physical reality of Hollywood, which sometimes looks too good to be true, as though we must have sold our souls to the devil for all those swimming pools and orange trees and young hopefuls basking in the sun. The idea of middle age—never mind old age, God forbid one hundred years!—is the violent opposite of everything Hollywood is based upon, which, as anyone can see, is and has always been beauty: youthful, feminine, saintly beauty like Mary Pickford, or disillusioned, lost beauty like Greta Garbo; beauty without a whisper of fading, sagging, or wrinkling, although real girls do age, of course, no matter how self-enchanted they are. And age is disaster.
When I was ten years old, growing up in a house not far from where I live now, I used to see some of these aging beauties on Hollywood Boulevard, and they terrified me. They were covered with wrinkles, their faces caked with white powder. They were laden with beaded black dresses; shellacked hair-like wigs (or wiglike hair) topped their ancient heads. These tiny old souvenirs of an earlier time, wearing black gloves up to their elbows, used to go window-shopping on Hollywood Boulevard, while their little old Pekingese dogs yipped impatiently from chauffeured limousines that waited to drive back to wherever they came from. These ladies must have blossomed among the mimosa in the drama 1920s, when being powdered and beaded and carrying tortoiseshell cigarette holders made them even more divine. But by the time I saw them, they were gargoyles, grotesque beyond even Norma Desmond’s Sunset Boulevard ruin. Of course, Gloria Swanson was more fabulous, much more self-enchanted. She still had lust burning in her loins, whereas these old beauties craved only the avocado-and-tomato sandwiches at C. C. Brown’s Ice Cream Parlour. I used to watch them eat with their dainty wizened hands and vowed never to get old, no matter what.
Back then, when I was ten years old, the movie stars I liked were women like Maureen O’Hara, with her pirate-red hair and her cleavage; and Rita Hayworth, the way she danced; and, of course, Marilyn Monroe, who drove me nuts in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. I saw River of No Return three times (even though it was abysmal, with Robert Mitchum insisting he had no idea what was happening the whole time, when any fool could see he was madly in love with her). One day, on my way home from taking a swimming lesson in the indoor pool at Hollywood High, so flooded with chlorine I always left with pink eyes, I saw Monroe and Jane Russell in front of Grauman’s Chinese immortalizing their handprints and footprints and, from that day forth, I felt Marilyn was my own personal movie star and that anything she did reflected on me directly. Even when she married Arthur Miller and started taking acting lessons, I not only forgave her, I knew she’d be okay once she came to her senses and got divorced. And earlier when she married Joe DiMaggio and lived directly across the street from my great-aunt Vera on Palm Drive in Beverly Hills, I thought she was there so I could keep an eye on her. When I was in the south of France in 1962, that August when she died, I knew if I’d stayed home in Hollywood it would never have happened.
The next year, I came back to L.A., leaving my parents and sister in Europe, and suddenly felt what those girls must have felt who came to Hollywood knowing no one, stranded, alone and wondering what the place meant with the winds in March blowing cold through the rooftops.
