There was a spectral feeling to the hotel. The guests kept to themselves. Only occasionally did you come across one shuffling from the elevator, unshaven and scratching. There was no dining room and limited room service. The telephonist was a famous Hollywood voice, adding to the hotel’s myth as he answered the phone in a low cracked whisper, with just one word, “Chateau . . .”
The rooms had not changed since the fifties. Mine was a small apartment that looked out over the Marlboro man’s groin. Dirty custard walls, shaggy brown carpets, a kitchenette, a sitting room, and a bedroom with a macabre “walk-in closet.” If one had a tendency towards suicide this was the perfect place. The kitchen had a gas oven that taunted one, and empty cupboards and drawers with a peculiar smell. There was a dining “nook” with an old table and four chairs, and the bed had a rubber sheet on top of the mattress so that the sheets slid off and strangled one in the night. The bathroom was vaguely Deco with faded green tiles, a thick chipped sink and a plastic shower curtain straight from Psycho. It felt as if the last inhabitant had died there. I thought I was miserable then but looking back, the Chateau was the pure essence of Hollywood, its corridors haunted by a thousand forgotten stars, and the walls of its rooms oozing the hopes and fears of everyone from Bette Davis, to James Dean, to John Belushi. Everyone had set up shop in that dusty old motel. Young hopefuls had dreamt there and old has-beens let the dream go. Now the Chateau was part of that dream. It held onto the past, like a lingering mourner at a graveside unwilling to move on.
It rained that first night, pattering on the palm trees outside. Through the musty net curtains Sunset Boulevard glistened and the whole city stretched out beneath me, and the feeling of isolation was almost like a terrible shattering orgasm, an endless shiver down the spine. This was not what I had expected.
The next day, after a sleepless night, I went to meet Orson for lunch at Ma Maison, a famous restaurant. I had read about Ma Maison in Jacqueline Susann novels and had a picture in my mind of plush velvet banquettes where the love machine sat alongside studio heads and Sharon Tate. Therefore I was quite surprised to find myself outside a sort of tent in a crumbling parking lot. Admittedly several Rolls-Royces were parked outside, but it was one of the shabbiest places I have ever seen. Inside, the floors were covered with AstroTurf, the diners sat on cheap white plastic chairs, and there was that thick hot smell of sun through tarpaulin.
The great man was alone at a small table away from the main dining area. It had real chairs around it. He looked like a mogul king and he dwarfed this little corner, as the Marlboro man dwarfed Sunset. He was beautifully turned out, in a grey suit and a shirt done up to the collar. No tie. He smelt vaguely of lemons. His beard was long and perfectly groomed, and he had large hands that charged you with a strange electricity when they shook yours. His eyes were deep and wise and magical. You knew they could turn to fury at the slightest provocation. He was a cobra, a Bond villain and a buddha. I could hardly breathe. I was mesmerised.
On the chair beside him sat two little dogs that growled dangerously as I sat down. With the utmost gentleness he took one in each giant hand and put them under the table.
“My God, you’re thin!” he said.
Damn. I knew I should have packed my bottom, and perhaps my Body Map suit had been a mistake? By now I was in a free-falling panic, so no sooner had I sat down than I got up to go to the bathroom. As I pulled back my chair there was a piercing yelp from under the table. Orson’s face flinched and his hands briefly made fists. Already he wanted to club me. The two tiny dogs snarled up at me from under the table and as I sat down again one bit deep into my ankle. I didn’t dare say anything at first although the pain was excruciating. We began to talk about the movie, or rather Orson talked while I bled. I had nothing in my head. My voice had turned falsetto. I noticed Orson looking at my wrists on the table and very slowly I pulled them up into my jacket. The dog bit me again, and I gasped. Orson looked at me with those terrifying eyes.
“I think your dog has taken a bit of a dislike to me,” I said.
“Mmmm,” he growled, and summoned the head waiter. “Patrick, Mitzi is such a fan of this young man, more so even than myself, that I’m afraid she has taken a memento from his ankle. Would you bring us Band-Aid and antiseptic?”
That first lunch was terrible, although I would never have admitted it. I could tell that he was disappointed. I was nothing that day. I had no personality. I was totally overwhelmed by him. We left the restaurant and an old junk heap of a car, a weird freak with a ponytail at the wheel, spluttered to a halt outside. Orson got in. The seat was definitely in the recline position and he lay there and waved as the car roared off at a snail’s pace, belching exhaust from a pipe that scraped along the road.
Lunch was at Ma Maison every day for the next few months. Sometimes just Orson and me. Sometimes we were joined by “the prince,” a faded Italian crustacean in a polo neck and dyed jet hair. He had heavy shiny eyelids and they blinked through dirty black spectacles. He smoked through a tortoiseshell cigarette holder, which remained clenched between his aged teeth. I never caught his name. Was it all a dream? I wondered to myself. Certainly Orson was a kind of Don Quixote, and there was no shortage of potential Sancho Panzas. But were we chasing a windmill or was a movie actually going to be made? My American agent, Michael Black, was suspicious.
On lunch three, Orson had a total meltdown. Patrick, the glamorous head waiter, was the son of the famous French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont. Orson always gave him a hundred-dollar bill as a tip. We were lunching with the prince that day and Patrick was settling us into Orson’s table.
“Careful when you shake my hand,” said Orson. “The last time you shook my hand, you nearly broke my finger.”
Patrick laughed good-naturedly, but suddenly Orson exploded with rage. “Don’t laugh at me!” he roared.
We all stopped dead in our tracks. The prince’s head sank into his polo neck and Patrick turned a beetroot colour as the huge bear bellowed at him. It was an alarming moment. Orson was a very large man. He moved with difficulty, and rage needs a body to express itself and through which it can escape. Orson had only his face. The rest of him was rigid. Finally he fell back into his chair, the face drained of colour, the huge frame heaving. He was Big Daddy from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The dogs caught the aroma of violence, baring their teeth and yapping crazily. I drew my legs high up under my chair. I didn’t want to start a feeding frenzy with my delicious ankles. Poor Patrick looked as if he was going to faint. He was rooted to the spot, shaking like a leaf.
“Now back off!” Orson growled.
There was a moment’s silence. The prince studied the menu as if it were a thing he had never seen before and slowly things returned to, what, normal? In an almost theatrical Italian accent, his head coming back out of his polo neck, he guided our windswept ship into calmer waters. “I have very interesting con-ver-sation with Lorimars today . . .”
Orson cast Amy Irving as my/his wife, and sometimes she came to lunch. She was pregnant with Max, and strangely so was Virginia at the time of the story. The prince set off for Rome. Orson disappeared for a while. Michael Black kept talking about a thing called “escrow.” We had to have it.
One day the prince called me from Rome to say that I had to move out of my hotel room.
“Officially, the movie is on hold,” he said. “Unofficially, we are still shooting.”
“Oh,” I replied uneasily. “What does that mean, exactly?”
“It means, don’t worry. Ciao, bello,” said the prince, and hung up.
Amy and her husband at the time, Steven Spielberg, took Orson to dinner, to try to help salvage the project, but I suspect it had always been a dream for Orson and not a reality. Sometimes I caught him looking at me under those hooded eyes—sombre, puzzled, and pulling away. I was a bird. He was a bear. I wasn’t his Orson. Clouds of depression seemed to gather above him as he sat in that converted tent on Melrose. Over lunch he told enchanting stories. A mid
night trip to Machu Picchu; Marlene getting a taxi to Paramount to find an old wig to wear for Touch of Evil . . . His voice was breathtaking, full of power and emotion with an extraordinary range. One can only imagine what he must have been like in the theatre. It flew through the registers, one moment deep and resonant, and the next higher, thinner, on the breath. Stories were told slowly, deliberately, often ending with a deep sigh.
Things had been quickly patched up with Patrick. He would pull the table back and accompany Orson out into the winter sunshine, lower him into the clapped-out car, and wave him off. The magician disappeared in a cloud of smoke.
On Christmas Day, I called him. “Any news, Orson?” I said.
“Storm clouds are gathering,” he replied. “It doesn’t look good.” We never spoke again. He died three months later.
CHAPTER 20
The Harris Hollywood House
I couldn’t go back to England empty-handed, and so I moved to a bed on the landing of my friend Damian Harris’ house on Hollywood Boulevard. It was a rambling tumbledown place, a plantation house from the Deep South plonked in the middle of suburbia. It was made of white clapboard, with a broken weathervane on top that permanently pointed down. Like every house in LA it was made for show, and certainly not to have its doors slammed. The walls were paper-thin and there was something spooky about it, particularly downstairs at the back where there was a swing door between the kitchen and the rest of the house that creaked back and forth without the slightest hint of a draught. I lay there on my landing every morning in a deep depression, unable to get up, watching the comings and goings of the various inhabitants, thanking my lucky stars for Damian. The Harris household was the foundation of my life in Hollywood for years to come.
Damian had married a mutual friend, a beautiful giantess called Annabelle. At about eight o’clock every morning Annabelle flew out of their bedroom dressed for Flashdance, thundering down the stairs and out of the house. A moment later her car squealed out of the drive and peace descended for a while. Like most young people in LA, she divided her time between AA meetings, acting classes and aerobics. When I moved in, one of her friends from AA was staying in the spare room upstairs, and one of her classmates was living on the couch in the breakfast nook off the kitchen. Who was the addict and who was the actor was a game that enthralled me in my leisure hours—i.e., all the time—especially after I found a bong under the actor’s bed one morning on a rummage around for a bit of cash; but it was generally agreed that the addict was the girl upstairs. Crystal was an LA punk with a tiny voice and stiletto heels. Her peroxide hair was whipped into a huge cone. Like many of us in that house, she slept a lot, although Annabelle valiantly dragged her out to the morning AA meeting and then to another at night, but she needn’t have bothered. Poor Crystal had no intention of submitting to a higher power. She gave us all crabs and then set fire to her room with a blowtorch while secretly doing crack in her bedroom cupboard. Damian, who mostly never seemed to notice who was staying in the house, put his foot down and she left in tears with twenty dollars borrowed from Mel Bordeaux.
Mel had recently graduated from NYU and arrived in LA to help Damian with a script he was writing. I was sent to collect her from the airport. She was standing on the kerb in an old suede jacket and dirty black jeans. She wore wraparound shades that hid her strange pale hooded eyes. When the shades came off she tugged at her long messy hair and looked out from behind it like a forest animal. She was quite chaotic. Tickets and tissues stuck out of every pocket. You could tell at a glance she was fun and trouble. Within five minutes we were old friends. Twenty years later we began to get to know each other. But friendships in Hollywood often go backwards.
In an apartment at the back of the house lived an actor called Eric Stoltz, with his girlfriend Ally Sheedy and their best friend, another actor, John Philbin. These three, like Annabelle, divided their time between AA and acting class, although they were all rather successful actors and didn’t seem to know very much about drink or drugs. But then in those days, going to AA could be much better than being represented by one of the big agencies. You were on a fast track right onto a recovering studio executive’s lap. All the addicts from the glorious seventies were still on Step 4, and one got the chance to meet and audition for some of the biggest producers and directors in town at the evening meeting. Once one had gone through the preliminaries—Hi, my name is Rupert, I have been shooting up Vim for the last ten years—one could spin any old yarn one wanted, going through the A to Z of emotions as one talked. AA was a talent show, but your award was a cake.
Hollywood Boulevard was a brilliant madhouse that was only quiet between seven and eight at night when all the recovering alcoholics were at a meeting and all the practising ones—Damian, me and Mel—were left briefly in peace for a few quiet drinks. Later, they all came back, with a screeching of brakes and a slamming of doors, with their scene partners from class, and for the rest of the evening the house turned into a sort of theatrical Cineplex. Annabelle would be hobbling around the sitting room on crutches being Vanessa Redgrave in Julia, while upstairs Eric and John would be rehearsing something more highbrow like Waiting for Godot, and Ally would be in floods of tears on the landing in a monologue of her own invention. At these moments, Damian, Mel and I slipped out of the house and went for dinner.
Annabelle swam ten miles a day in an enormous pool owned by the director Tony Richardson. He lived on the side of the hill above Sunset on an almost vertical street called Kings Road. His house perched on a crag and beneath it was a beautiful jungle of orchids that led down to the pool and a tennis court, which were cupped in the floor of a small canyon, the leftovers of some large estate from ancient times. It was a beautiful pool with a pink cottage at one end, the canyon towering above it. Houses clung precariously to the rocks. The sky seemed to be far away. Noises bounced off the hills: snatches of laughter, music, a car straining up the canyon. In the evenings long shadows quickly engulfed it, dragging everything into the cold Hollywood night, and the cities of the plain below could be seen in the cleavage of two hills twinkling in preparation for another early night. Exotic golden pheasants strutted round a large aviary and Tony’s gardener Bob could be heard arguing on the phone from the little pool house.
Inside Tony’s house was a vast picture window with a view over the whole city. In front of it that evening four ancient men sat around a small table playing bridge.
“Annabella!” said one.
“Two hearts!” said another.
And they went on playing.
“Who are all those men?” I asked Annabelle as we sat with our legs dangling in the shallow end of the pool.
“Christopher Isherwood, his boyfriend, Don Bachardy, and Gavin Lambert,” she replied carelessly.
“Inside Daisy Clover Gavin Lambert?” I asked, aghast.
“Inside what?” She laughed and jumped in.
I watched her swim for a bit and then I crept back through the jungle of orchids to the house to have a peek at the legends inside. They were almost silhouettes now against the huge window. The glimmering backdrop of the city they had adopted sketched their faces with mauve and silver outlines. Why had they come here? They seemed impossibly ancient, tribal elders locked in some pagan ritual, their faces carved with lines. They hardly moved. They stared at each other solemnly. Occasionally in slow motion, someone laid a card on the table, an eyebrow raised slightly, one face turned imperceptibly towards another, a hand reaching for a drink—whisky—through which the setting sun sparkled amber.
Isherwood and Bachardy had matching crew-cuts. Tony had a massive naked cranium to house his enormous brain. It was covered with a few wisps, which in the dusk could have been a mist of ideas rising from his head. Gavin had a majestic comb-over. He was the young girl of the party, slightly coy. I wondered if they’d all had him. (“Good gracious, no!” he said, years later, when we became close friends. “One has to draw the line somewhere!”)
But Tony presided o
ver the group like an eagle. His face was gaunt and his gaze deep and unnerving. His nose was a dangerous beak, and the lower lids of his eyes hung slightly. He was dressed scruffily and he had the strangest voice I have ever heard.
Suddenly Annabelle was behind me, dripping. She sailed into the house. “Rupert’s been watching you all through the kitchen window,” she announced.
“How exciting!” said Christopher. “Were we interesting?”
“Very,” I mumbled, embarrassed.
Tony and I became great friends. He was fascinating; in that city of conformity his utter indifference to what other people thought set him apart. There was everyone else and there was him. People were afraid of him, and like a semi-tame bird of prey he responded to fear and could be vicious. Getting to know him was no guarantee of safety. He could still be blisteringly scathing and famously reduced everyone at some point or other to quivering jellies. But he was always interested. He was neither gay nor straight, although he had passions for both men and women. His detractors, and there were many, said that he was simply a closeted homosexual. But he was much more complicated than that. He was a genuine outsider and hated the idea of being part of any group. He was particularly horrified by religion; and having discovered that I was Catholic and still went to mass, he loved to needle me about it.
Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins Page 20
