Lola Bensky

by Lily Brett

  Before the plane had even reached its cruising altitude, Eric Burdon was fast asleep. He clearly wasn’t made nervous by small planes, Lola thought. Lola was sitting next to John Weider, The Animals’ lead guitarist and violinist. John Weider was Lola’s age. He had been in bands since he was very young. He played with Steve Marriott and the Moments before Steve Marriott and half The Moments went on to form The Small Faces. ‘I don’t like small planes,’ Lola said to John Weider. ‘They make me nervous.’

  ‘Are you Jewish?’ John Weider said.

  Lola laughed. ‘Do you think I’m Jewish because I’m nervous?’ she said.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said.

  ‘I’m very Jewish,’ she said.

  ‘I’m Jewish, too,’ John Weider said.

  ‘I thought so,’ Lola said. ‘Because of the violin.’

  ‘I studied classical violin for nine years from the time I was seven till I was sixteen,’ he said. ‘I also took up the guitar and the bass.’

  John Weider had a large Afro hairstyle. She thought his hair was probably naturally curly, even though he came from England where more and more men were perming curls into their hair. Jews tended to have curly hair, Lola had noticed. Mama Cass, Linda Eastman and Lillian Roxon seemed to be exceptions to that rule.

  Lola was about to ask John Weider if his parents minded him being in a rock band, when the plane lurched violently to the right. Lola gripped her seat. No one else looked alarmed. Ravi Shankar had the same peaceful expression on his face as he’d had when he was playing the sitar. Eric Burdon was still asleep. The plane felt as though it was bumping into solid pockets of air. Lola felt a bit sick. She hoped her sunglasses hid her queasiness.

  ‘Please make sure your seatbelts are on and firmly fastened,’ the captain said. ‘This turbulence will be over in about two minutes and we will be landing in Los Angeles very soon after that.’ Lola looked at Ravi Shankar. He did look a little green now, she thought. She smiled at him. He smiled back.

  She wondered if she had enough time to ask John Weider how his parents felt about him being in a rock band. She looked out of the window. They were just about to land.

  7

  Mama Cass was holding a large, highly polished, bright-green Granny Smith apple. Lola, who was there to interview The Mamas and the Papas, wondered why Mama Cass was carrying an apple. Maybe she, like Lola, was planning to go on a diet. Mama Cass had just arrived in her new yellow Aston Martin at the Bel Air, Los Angeles, a house that John and Michelle Phillips shared. Denny Doherty wasn’t there yet. Maybe he was still in his Laurel Canyon home that had once belonged to the actress Mary Astor.

  John and Michelle’s spectacular house on Bel Air Road had been owned by Jeanette MacDonald, who had starred in many Hollywood musicals with Nelson Eddy and Maurice Chevalier. The house was on two-and-a-half acres of carefully planted and manicured and terraced gardens. There were trees and shrubs and flowers and a grapevine and a rose arbour and a fountain. A path led from the house to the swimming pool, which had curved instead of straight edges. Next to the pool was a small version of the main house. It had a living room, a fireplace, a bedroom, a bathroom and a kitchen. There were also stables that Jeanette MacDonald’s husband had built to house their horses. To go with the house, John and Michelle had a 1932 Rolls-Royce Tourer, a 1932 Rolls-Royce Limousine and a 1957 Rolls-Royce Silver Door Coupé.

  Lola found the house and the cars a little overwhelming. But then Lola found Los Angeles a little overwhelming. There was too much of it and everything was a long way from everything else. The cornflakes and the milk in the supermarket only came in giant sizes. There were sixteen-year-olds driving very large cars. And the police were nowhere near as nice as they were in New York. Their guns and their expressions looked menacing.

  Lola had rented a second-hand Volkswagen. Two days ago, she had been pulled over by a policeman on Wilshire Boulevard while she had been trying to navigate several unnamed streets and eerily similar roads. He had asked for her ID. ‘In Australia we don’t have to carry ID,’ she said.

  ‘You’re not in Australia any more, Miss,’ he said. ‘I could arrest you on the spot.’

  Lola didn’t want to be arrested a second time. Her arrest for shop-lifting, when she was ten, had not been a picnic. Lola didn’t think that Renia and Edek would take the news of another arrest any better than they’d taken the previous arrest.

  ‘I promise I’ll carry my passport with me everywhere I go, Officer,’ she said. She had learned to address all policemen as ‘Officer’ from Edek, who was an impatient driver and was continually being caught for exceeding the speed limit. ‘I’m sorry, Officer’ was always the first thing Edek said. He often repeated it several times. Being apologetic to policemen was always a good thing, Edek said.

  Edek had had his own run-in with police. It had been with the American Military Police, in Feldafing, the camp for displaced people not far from Munich, where Edek and Renia were still sleeping in barracks and still desperately trying to get out of Germany, after the war. Edek had been wheeling and dealing, on a very small scale, on the black market. He had collected and sold cigarettes and coffee rations given to him by the Red Cross in an effort to buy Renia some butter. He finally had a pound of butter for Renia, when he was stopped by an American military policeman.

  ‘I should arrest you for having more butter than your rations entitle you to,’ the American military policeman had said.

  ‘I’m very sorry, Officer,’ Edek said. He still barely weighed a hundred-and-twenty pounds. The American military policeman grinned at him.

  ‘I’ll let you go if you eat the butter,’ he said.

  ‘Now, Officer?’ Edek said.

  ‘Yes, now,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, Officer,’ said Edek. He ate the pound of butter. He was sick with abdominal pains and diarrhoea for a week.

  ‘I’m really sorry, Officer,’ Lola said to the policeman who’d pulled her over. ‘And thank you for explaining the situation to me.’

  The cop nodded. ‘Don’t forget, this is America,’ he said.

  Lola drove off, slowly. She was going to the Ambassador Hotel, where she was staying. She had chosen the 500-room Ambassador Hotel from a hotel directory at the airport because it was expensive and, in her admittedly limited experience, she felt that expensive hotels, unlike their cheaper counterparts, would not ask for a deposit. Lola had no money. Or, more accurately, she couldn’t find the money that she had. If finding which bank her salary from Rock-Out had been transferred to was difficult in London and New York, it was impossible in Los Angeles. You could drive around Los Angeles for a year and you might still not find the right bank.

  Lola had been stunned when she had first seen the Ambassador Hotel. It was huge. It occupied twenty-three-and-a-half acres at 3400 Wilshire Boulevard. The hotel’s Cocoanut Grove nightclub featured entertainers like Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Judy Garland, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, Lena Horne, Little Richard, Liberace and Liza Minnelli. Marilyn Monroe had begun her career as a client of the modelling agency that had its office just next to the swimming pool at the Ambassador Hotel.

  Diana Ross and The Supremes were staying on the same floor of the hotel as Lola. They were performing at the Cocoanut Grove. Lola was bothered by the spelling of Cocoanut. It was cocoa and coconut. Not cocoanut. She knew the hotel was owned by the Schine family. It sounded like a Jewish name. Lola wondered if they were Jews who could not yet spell well. That was before she discovered that G. David Schine, the president of the Ambassador Hotel, was the son of J. Myer Schine. The family had established a number of successful business ventures in hotels, real estate and movie theatres. Lola knew that if the Schine family had done that well, they probably knew how to spell.

  Earlier in the day, Lola had passed Diana Ross in the corridor outside her room. Apart from being startlingly beautiful, Diana Ross was very slender and light-footed. She looked as though her feet, in her high stiletto heels, hardly touched the carpeted floo
r when she walked. She walked with the delicacy and grace of an antelope. Lola felt like an elephant.

  To Lola’s relief, no one at the Ambassador Hotel had asked her for a deposit. All the staff had been very friendly. Lola thought the friendliness must come with the extra dollars. No one at the Horwood Hotel in New York had ever been anything but surly or grumpy.

  Lola was checking out of the Ambassador the next day. She had finally located her money and rented a small studio apartment. The apartment was on Sunset Strip, on Sunset Boulevard, diagonally across the road from the Whisky a Go Go.

  John Phillips looked a bit agitated that his fellow Papa, Denny Doherty, still hadn’t turned up. John, who was born John Edmund Andrew Phillips, a name that sounded to Lola as though he were part of Britain’s royal family, did have a slightly patrician air about him. Maybe that was because he was older than Lola. John Phillips, who was thirty-one, was eleven years older than Lola and nine years older than Michelle. John Phillips had given Lola a tour of the house when she had first arrived. He was charming, but Lola had felt wary of his charm. Lola thought he was a little condescending to Michelle. Someone had told her that John’s response to Michelle about her affair with Denny had been, ‘Don’t fuck with my tenor.’

  John’s tenor, John had decided, was clearly not going to show up. Lola thought that that might be a good thing given the convoluted romantic interconnections between Denny and Mama Cass and Michelle and Denny and Michelle and John. Although Lola knew that Michelle was now pregnant with John’s child, Lola thought that the possibly still-raw entanglements might have complicated things. She had been told that Denny had been trying to drink Michelle out of his life. But maybe complications like this were a part of everyday life in this part of the world. This was Los Angeles and movie stars and celebrities did wild things, which were reported with gusto by gossip columnists and lapped up by the public.

  John Phillips wandered off and left Lola with Michelle and Mama Cass. Mama Cass was wearing a floral-print cotton dress that was gathered below the bust and came to just above her knees. Mama Cass’s legs, Lola noticed, were not that fat. Her ankles and calves looked an almost normal size.

  Mama Cass was still holding her Granny Smith apple. She put it on the table in front of her. They were sitting in what Lola thought must be the sunroom or part of the kitchen. Lola wondered if Michelle felt awkward sitting with two fat women. She didn’t look awkward. She’d given Mama Cass a big kiss when Mama Cass had arrived. There was something unexpectedly sweet about Michelle Phillips, Lola thought. Michelle had brought Lola a drink and made sure there was enough space on the table for Lola’s tape recorder and her notebook.

  ‘Do the two of you get on well together?’ Lola said.

  ‘We do,’ said Michelle. ‘We’ve always – or almost always – been close.’

  ‘Michelle is a really good person,’ Mama Cass said. ‘And looking the way she does, she could easily be a bitch and everyone would still fall in love with her. But she’s not a bitch. She’s very beautiful and she’s a good person and a very good friend.’

  ‘We’re all beautiful in a different way,’ said Michelle.

  ‘That’s lame,’ said Mama Cass. ‘You can’t be beautiful if you’re fat. No one sees your beauty.’

  ‘Maybe that’s an asset,’ Lola said. ‘You have to try harder.’

  ‘Being fat is never an asset,’ said Mama Cass. Mama Cass was probably right, Lola thought. Being fat was probably never an asset. And it took up a lot of time. She was sure Michelle Phillips had never spent even one minute planning a diet.

  ‘Cass is brilliantly clever,’ Michelle said. ‘She had an IQ of 165 when she was still a child.’

  ‘We joke,’ said Mama Cass, ‘that she’s the body and I’m the brain.’

  ‘She is the brain,’ said Michelle. ‘She does all the talking when we are on stage because she does it so well. And she’s so funny. I don’t feel comfortable talking on stage and I don’t do it well. I’m comfortable with the fact that Cass talks on stage and John talks to the press. He’s good at that.’

  John certainly was good at that, Lola thought. He’d given Lola a blow-by-blow account of all of their successes, every album and each single. He’d also explained how unique they were as a group and how he had trained Mama Cass not to belt out songs, but to ‘blend, blend, blend’ her voice with Michelle’s.

  Michelle Phillips did seem comfortable in herself. She sat and walked with the air and ease of someone who was at home with her arms and chest and pelvic bones and feet. When Michelle met John Phillips, he was married with two children. He divorced his wife and married Michelle, who was eighteen. Lola wondered how Michelle could still look radiant and at peace with herself after losing her mother when she was young, and growing up with a constantly unravelling series of four stepmothers and half-a-dozen changes of location.

  Mama Cass bit into her apple. Lola was surprised that Mama Cass had brought her own apple. Although she shouldn’t be surprised. Lola understood the necessity of making sure you had the right food when you were on a specific diet. And maybe John and Michelle didn’t have much fruit in the house. Lola couldn’t see any. Renia always had fruit in the house. Even when they were very poor. She always had a bowl of apples, oranges, mandarins and bananas on the table. And, when they were in season, a bowl of cherries. Renia saw fruit as a symbol of wealth. In Renia’s terms, if you could afford fruit, you were definitely not starving.

  John and Michelle Phillips had other symbols of wealth. The cars, the Limoges porcelain, the Venetian glass and the drugs. An open container of assorted pills was in the living room. It was placed there as though it were a bowl of nuts or sweets for guests to snack on. John had offered Lola some. He hadn’t said what they were. Maybe, Lola thought, you were supposed to be so familiar with what everyone was taking that you knew what you were being offered.

  ‘No thanks,’ she’d said to John Phillips. ‘I’m already a disappointment to my parents because I’m fat and I’m not a lawyer. I think it might kill them if I started taking drugs.’

  ‘That’s so cute,’ John Phillips had said. Lola didn’t know which part was cute – the part about her being a disappointment, or the part about her killing her parents.

  ‘Anyway, I don’t like being out of control,’ she’d added.

  ‘This isn’t being out of control,’ John Phillips said. ‘It’s an expansion of your control.’

  ‘I’m on a diet,’ Mama Cass said to Lola.

  ‘I wish people didn’t make so much of Cass’s size,’ said Michelle. ‘Every line that’s written about us mentions Cass’s size.’

  ‘When people describe me they don’t say I’m smart, which I am, they say I’m fat,’ said Mama Cass. ‘Everyone mentions Michelle’s looks, too.’

  ‘Maybe that’s just part of being female,’ said Lola. ‘Guys can be thin or short or fat or covered in acne and it doesn’t seem to matter. It’s not reported.’

  ‘That’s true, and probably always will be,’ said Mama Cass.

  ‘I wish people would concentrate on Cass’s voice,’ Michelle said.

  ‘Maybe they will when I’ve lost weight,’ said Mama Cass. ‘I’ve decided that now I’m a mother, I’m going to lose weight.’

  Mama Cass had given birth to a daughter a few months before the Monterey International Pop Festival. No one other than Mama Cass knew who the father was. ‘I was surprised to find myself pregnant,’ said Mama Cass. ‘I’d been told that at my size my chances of conceiving were very slim.’ She laughed. ‘My chances of conception were the only slim part of me. When the doctor told me I was unlikely to get pregnant again I knew straightaway that I was going to have this baby’.

  Lola couldn’t understand why a woman’s size would affect her ability to get pregnant. The sperm only had to travel up one of the two fallopian tubes and fertilise an egg. And, after a while, the fertilised egg moved on to the womb. Lola thought Mama Cass’s fallopian tubes or her womb weren’t where her fat was
stored. Still, it seemed to be a commonly held belief.

  ‘My mother has been telling me for years that fat girls don’t find it easy to get pregnant,’ said Lola.

  ‘Do you mean your mother wanted you to get pregnant?’ said Michelle, looking worried.

  ‘No. Not at all,’ said Lola. ‘She was absolutely sure I wouldn’t be having sex. Her remark about me having trouble getting pregnant was usually preceded by how fat girls don’t get boyfriends and no one wants to marry them.’

  ‘That’s probably true, unless you’re rich or famous,’ said Mama Cass. ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’

  ‘Sort of,’ said Lola. ‘But I think he’d prefer someone slimmer.’

  ‘Dump him,’ said Mama Cass.

  ‘I’m not rich or famous enough,’ said Lola. Her answer was supposed to be a joke, but when it came out, it didn’t sound at all funny.

  Michelle left the room. Lola wondered if the conversation had become too focused on fat.

  ‘Did you feel well when you were pregnant?’ Lola asked Mama Cass. She wasn’t sure why she wanted to know. Maybe she was just checking out what a pregnancy for a fat person would be like. She didn’t think she was asking the question for the readers of Rock-Out.

  ‘I felt great,’ said Mama Cass. ‘I took acid five times when I was pregnant.’

  Lola knew she would definitely not be mentioning this fact in Rock-Out.