Lola Bensky

by Lily Brett

  ‘Thank you,’ said Cher.

  ‘Our wardrobe is our most expensive overhead,’ Sonny said. ‘We spend about two thousand dollars a month on clothes.’ Lola was shocked. That was a lot of money to spend on clothes every month. Sonny and Cher were spending almost half of what the average person would earn in a year on clothes every month.

  ‘The clothes you saw in London have been put into storage,’ Sonny said. ‘New clothes are being made continually.’ The clothes Sonny was referring to were the seven suitcases and several wardrobes crammed with clothes Sonny had shown Lola. ‘We have our own seamstress who works for us full-time,’ Sonny said. ‘Cher designs our clothes. Her clothes and my clothes.’

  ‘How can you come up with all these different ideas for outfits?’ Lola said to Cher.

  ‘Cher has this marvellous talent for designing,’ said Sonny. ‘She’ll get an idea and within three minutes she has sketched another outfit. I wish I could write songs like that.’

  Cher smiled modestly and took Sonny’s hand. He put his arm around her.

  ‘Did you enjoy London?’ Lola said to Cher.

  ‘I bought Cher this ring in London,’ said Sonny. Lola remembered seeing the ring, in London. It was enormous. It was so big, it looked fake. ‘It’s a twenty-carat diamond-and-sapphire ring,’ said Sonny. ‘I bought it for Cher’s twentieth birthday.

  ‘We owe a lot of our success to London,’ Sonny said. ‘We were getting nowhere. Our clothes and everything about us were just too weird for Americans. The Rolling Stones told us that if we wanted to make it, we had to go to England. So we did. When we tried to check into the London Hilton Hotel, they told us that we didn’t have a reservation. I knew it was because of the way we looked. I was upset. There was a bit of a commotion in the lobby. Two photographers were there and took photographs. Later that day we were on the front page of the Daily Telegraph.’

  ‘And we were famous,’ said Cher.

  ‘Thousands of people turned up at our store appearance,’ said Sonny. ‘And “I Got You Babe” came out and replaced The Beatles at the top of the charts.’

  ‘It all happened so fast,’ said Cher.

  ‘When we came back from that trip to London the news had spread, and everything was happening for us here in America,’ said Sonny.

  ‘We went from having to be so careful with our money to being able to go shopping for anything we wanted,’ said Cher. ‘I couldn’t get used to it,’ she said. ‘I wanted to buy extra things for when the money ran out and we were poor again.’

  ‘What do you do when you’re not working?’ said Lola. She hadn’t addressed the question to anyone in particular.

  ‘We like to go out on hill hikes or ride our motorcycles,’ Sonny said.

  ‘I am terrified of motorbikes,’ Lola said. ‘When I was about eight, a man riding a motorbike crashed into our house. He was so smashed up.’

  There was a silence. Lola wished she hadn’t said that. It was hardly an uplifting thing to say.

  ‘Poor guy,’ said Cher. ‘Was he okay?’

  ‘He didn’t look okay to me,’ Lola said, and immediately chided herself. She should have said that he was fine.

  Sonny was frowning. Maybe Sonny’s frown had nothing to do with Lola or the man who’d crashed his motorbike into the Benskys’ house. Lola had heard that Sonny was unfaithful to Cher, and that Sonny’s most recent infidelity had been with his new secretary – and Cher had caught them mid-act. Maybe that was partly responsible for Sonny’s frown.

  Lola asked Cher if they had a lot of friends in LA. ‘We do not involve ourselves intimately with other pop stars,’ Sonny said. Lola restrained herself from asking if he saved his intimate involvements for his secretaries. Something about Sonny was starting to annoy her. ‘We’re only closely related to about five or six people, and they are mostly business associates,’ Sonny said. Sonny’s language, Lola was learning, could meander and be a bit obscure. They don’t socialise with pop stars. Only have a handful of people they’re close to. Mostly business associates, she wrote in her notebook.

  ‘We don’t go out much,’ said Sonny. ‘We enjoy each other’s company tremendously. I think the main things essential for personal happiness are doing things that you enjoy doing and, in our case, having each other.’

  The phone rang. Sonny took the phone and walked into another room.

  ‘I’m in awe of Sonny,’ said Cher. ‘He calms me down.’

  ‘Calms you down about what?’ said Lola.

  ‘Calms me down about being on stage,’ said Cher. ‘I couldn’t appear on stage without him.’

  ‘What are you frightened of?’ said Lola

  ‘I get a shut-up, locked-in feeling on stage. I feel trapped. I then panic about what would happen if I needed to get off stage in the middle of a performance. But with Sonny there, I’m okay.’

  Lola was surprised to hear Cher speaking like that. She’d thought that with Cher’s looks, her beautiful face and perfect and perfectly slender body, Cher would feel embraced by the world. Not scared or frightened of being trapped. ‘Did you always feel that way about singing?’ said Lola.

  ‘Yes,’ said Cher. ‘I was terrified to even sing backup on other people’s records. I rely on Sonny for everything, really,’ said Cher.

  ‘You’ve been with Sonny since you were sixteen, haven’t you?’ said Lola.

  ‘Yes,’ said Cher.

  ‘He’s twelve years older than you. Does that age difference matter to you?’ said Lola.

  ‘I like it,’ said Cher. ‘Sonny makes me feel very safe.’

  ‘Has being so successful and so famous helped you with your fears onstage?’ said Lola.

  ‘I think it has,’ said Cher. ‘But it’s really Sonny who’s made me feel better.’ Lola was getting a bit tired of hearing how wonderful and wonderfully protective Sonny was. Something about Sonny seemed too slick to her, too opportunistic, too chauvinistic.

  ‘I’m also terrified of flying,’ said Cher. ‘Sonny used to have to talk to me for hours sometimes before I could get on a plane. I’m better now. I take sleeping pills and knock myself out for the entire trip.’

  ‘You don’t look like a person who’s terrified of anything,’ said Lola. ‘You look so perfectly beautiful.’

  ‘Thank you. That’s very nice of you,’ said Cher.

  ‘This is a fabulous house,’ said Lola.

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ said Cher. ‘I feel lucky to be able to live like this. We have a woman who comes and cooks on weekdays. I’m not really the housewifely type. The woman can’t come on the weekends so I have to cook and make the beds. Sonny calls them my womanly duties.’ Lola felt glad that she hadn’t brought up the diamante-lined false eyelashes. Something was making her feel sorry for Cher.

  ‘I think we look a little alike,’ said Cher, looking at Lola. Sonny came back into the room. He hovered around Cher as though he were nervous of what she had been saying. ‘Do you think we look alike, Son?’ said Cher, looking at Lola.

  ‘Other people have said that,’ said Lola. ‘But I always reply that I’m twice Cher’s size.’

  ‘I can see the resemblance,’ said Cher. ‘Can you, Son?’

  ‘No,’ he said, looking perplexed. ‘I can’t see any resemblance at all.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ said Lola to Cher. ‘You don’t have to worry about looking like me. You look nothing like me.’

  ‘You sure don’t,’ said Sonny.

  Lola was sitting at one of the tables close to the stage at the Whisky a Go Go. Lola thought the DJ, who played records in between sets by live bands, had the volume up way too high. She put her hands over her ears and watched the two go-go dancers, who were dancing from cages suspended from the ceiling. Lola didn’t know how anyone could dance in a cage, let alone one suspended from a ceiling. Being up in the air didn’t seem to bother either one of the girls dancing in the cages. Both of them wore very brief outfits. Lola wondered whether, if she hadn’t been fat, she too would have been able to bare her
body like that. She wasn’t sure. She was so used to covering herself up that she couldn’t imagine having a body that she wanted to show off.

  The dancers looked a little bored, Lola thought. Their dancing, which looked more free-form than choreographed, didn’t seem to require a lot of precision or skill. It was basically a series of repetitive, uncomplicated movements with their arms and legs and sometimes their heads. Still, there was something mesmerising about having girls dance in midair. It must be linked to the thrill, Lola thought, of watching trapeze artists or highwire performers.

  Lola was early. The Whisky a Go Go wasn’t crowded yet, but Lola knew it would be. She had come to see Sam and Dave, whose string of hits included ‘Soul Man’, ‘Soothe Me’ and ‘Hold On, I’m Comin”. Lola was hoping to get a short interview with Sam and Dave, or at least one of them. She knew they’d just arrived back from a tour of Europe with Otis Redding.

  Lola was feeling disconcerted after her interview with Sonny and Cher. She had written about Sonny and Cher’s beautiful and beautifully furnished house, and Cher’s designing skills and her bell-bottom trousers, which were now being copied around the world. But she felt bothered. She wondered if Cher minded Sonny answering almost all of the questions, including the ones specifically addressed to Cher. And she wondered whether Cher minded Sonny fucking other women.

  Lola came out of these thoughts about Cher to see Jimi Hendrix waving to her. He was talking to someone on the other side of the stage. Lola knew that Jimi Hendrix, who was still almost unknown in LA, was also on at the Whisky a Go Go that night.

  The Whisky a Go Go, although it was only a few years old, was known as a place where stars who were about to be discovered, as well as those who had already been discovered, performed. The Doors had been the house band at the Whisky a Go Go until one night when Jim Morrison, supposedly high on acid and alcohol, began a meandering, semi-improvised, rambling rendition of ‘The End’. Thirty-five minutes later, Jim Morrison got to a line about wanting to fuck his mother all night. And that was that. The Whiskey’s management didn’t want their club closed. They stopped the show and fired the band.

  After Monterey, Jimi Hendrix may still have been relatively unknown by the general public in Los Angeles, but the cognoscenti at the heart of the rock world in LA was all over him. She had heard he was staying at Peter Tork’s estate in Laurel Canyon. Lola had met Peter Tork when she’d interviewed The Monkees. Peter Tork, who was short and slight and had a very deep voice, was quiet and quietly intelligent. Jimi was in good company in Laurel Canyon. Among his neighbours were Brian Wilson, Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, Mama Cass, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, Mike Bloomfield and Carole King.

  Jimi Hendrix came over to Lola. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t even surprised when I saw you.’

  Lola laughed. ‘I’m not stalking you,’ she said.

  ‘I know you haven’t come to LA to see my hair curlers,’ said Jimi Hendrix.

  ‘No,’ said Lola. ‘I’ve come here to interview a few people.’

  ‘You’re very serious, aren’t you?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Lola. ‘I don’t feel very serious.’ She didn’t think she was very serious. Planning diets was not a serious occupation or hobby. And she didn’t seem serious about starting the diets.

  ‘You are a serious chick,’ said Jimi Hendrix. ‘Where were you staying in Monterey? I didn’t see you after the first day.’

  ‘I had a motel room quite close to the fairgrounds,’ said Lola.

  ‘You’re also an organised chick, aren’t you?’ he said.

  ‘I think I am organised,’ she said. Lola laughed and looked at Jimi Hendrix. ‘I doubt if you were walking around Monterey looking for me,’ she said.

  ‘No, I wasn’t,’ said Jimi Hendrix. ‘I just noticed I didn’t see you around.’

  ‘You had plenty to occupy you at Monterey,’ said Lola. ‘You were a sensation.’

  ‘It was groovy,’ he said.

  ‘I think it was more than groovy,’ said Lola.

  ‘I’ll sit down with you for a few minutes, if you don’t mind,’ said Jimi Hendrix, ‘and then I have to go and get ready. We’re on first before Sam and Dave.’

  ‘I’ve heard they’re very good,’ said Lola.

  ‘Their nickname is Double Dynamite,’ said Jimi Hendrix. ‘They’re very, very good.’

  ‘Even Double Dynamite could have a hard time following you,’ said Lola.

  ‘Your mother and father being in Nazi death camps is probably what made you serious,’ said Jimi Hendrix.

  ‘You remember that?’ said Lola.

  ‘It’s not something you hear about every day,’ said Jimi Hendrix. ‘Of course I remember.’

  ‘I think I’m organised because my parents’ lives were so disordered, disarranged and deranged,’ said Lola. ‘In the death camps, the rules changed from minute to minute. Everything was unpredictable. My mother said you never knew what to expect.’ Renia hadn’t actually said that directly to Lola. Renia used to mutter it to herself.

  ‘Any minute was another selection, another rollcall, another kapo coming to check up on you if you took more than one minute in the toilet block, even if you had diarrhoea or were vomiting,’ Renia used to say to herself. Lola knew by the time she was four and at kindergarten that the selections were for the gas. She didn’t know what the gas was, but she knew it wasn’t good. When Lola started school and discovered that there was a rollcall first thing in the morning, she had fled and tried to hide.

  ‘I can see why you would want to avoid anything unpredictable,’ said Jimi Hendrix.

  ‘I can see why I book motel rooms well in advance and make sure I never run out of recording tape,’ said Lola.

  ‘I like to go with the flow,’ said Jimi Hendrix. ‘I like to shoot the breeze.’

  ‘I don’t shoot anything,’ said Lola.

  ‘I think I know that, man,’ Jimi Hendrix said. ‘And it’s probably a good thing. Some of the stuff that’s on the streets is no good.’

  ‘But you use it, don’t you?’ said Lola.

  ‘Everyone does,’ said Jimi Hendrix.

  Jimi was looking at a woman sitting at a table on the other side of the room. The woman had long, tangled, curly black hair and was wearing a long black dress.

  ‘She looks like she works voodoo roots,’ said Jimi Hendrix.

  ‘Voodoo?’ said Lola.

  ‘Yeah, voodoo,’ said Jimi Hendrix. ‘Some people can work voodoo roots. They can put something in your food or put a hair in your shoe. Voodoo stuff. Someone worked voodoo roots on me, but she must have been half-hearted because I was only sick in the hospital for two or three days.’

  ‘You were in hospital because someone worked some sort of voodoo on you?’ said Lola.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jimi Hendrix. ‘It was a while ago.’

  ‘I don’t believe in voodoo,’ said Lola.

  ‘You should,’ said Jimi Hendrix. ‘It’s very powerful. You have to be careful. Human beings die too easily.’

  There was a long silence. Lola knew how easily human beings could die. She thought she’d probably known that all her life. What she would discover, decades later, was that it wasn’t that easy to live.

  ‘I nearly died of fright last week,’ Lola said to Jimi Hendrix. ‘I was driving and I was pulled over by a cop with a gun and a threatening expression. He said he could arrest me for driving without any ID. In Australia the police don’t carry guns, so being that close to a gun and a cop with a menacing expression was bothering enough.’

  ‘You should try being black in America, man,’ Jimi Hendrix said. ‘You can get pulled over, worked over and sent to jail for anything.’

  ‘That must be very frightening,’ Lola said.

  ‘It is, man,’ said Jimi Hendrix. ‘It really is.’

  Lola felt she had to change the subject. She seemed to have an ability to enable any conversation to take a morose or sombre turn. Even Mickey Mouse would probably become surly
and ungregarious after talking to her, she decided.

  ‘You must be happy about Monterey,’ Lola said to Jimi Hendrix. ‘Everyone said it was your big breakthrough in America.’

  ‘I am happy,’ said Jimi Hendrix. ‘I’ll be very happy if it means that we can spend more money on making our records. I want to be able to get the things I see and feel into the music. I want to make money to make the music better. It’s not that I have no other value for money. Of course I value money. But I want to make money so I don’t have to do albums that are made in a very short time because there’s not enough money to do them properly.

  ‘You can always do things better,’ said Jimi Hendrix. ‘Sometimes when I finish recording something, I’ve got a hundred completely new ideas and I’d like to go back and record it differently. You can do that if you’ve got money. I hate one-dimensional sounds. I like a really deep sound, when you’ve got all the depth of your thoughts and your feelings in the sound.’

  ‘I think you’re going to have enough money to record records in whatever way you want to record them,’ said Lola.

  ‘Thank you for saying that,’ Jimi Hendrix said.

  ‘My father would have answered me with “From your mouth to God’s ear,”’ Lola said. ‘It’s an old Yiddish saying.’

  ‘I like that,’ said Jimi Hendrix. ‘From your mouth to God’s ear.’ He looked at Lola. ‘You still thinking about the death camps a lot?’ he said.

  ‘Do I think about them a lot?’ said Lola.

  ‘I think so,’ said Jimi Hendrix. ‘I would, too,’ he added. Lola thought about it. She didn’t think she thought about death camps that much. She spent far more time planning diets.

  ‘I hear you’re staying with Peter Tork,’ Lola said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jimi Hendrix. ‘That house has one or two thousand rooms and a cute yellow puppy and balconies from which you can see Seattle and Piccadilly Circus.’ Lola saw Noel Redding wave to Jimi. ‘Time to go,’ said Jimi. ‘It was nice talking to you.’

  The Whisky a Go Go was full now. There were a lot of celebrities there. Mama Cass was sitting next to Jim Morrison. Jim Morrison looked as petulant as he had in New York. The Jimi Hendrix Experience began to play. Lola looked around her. Jimi Hendrix was having the same effect on the audience here as he had had in Monterey. People looked both astonished and electrified.