Flying Visits

by Clive James

  Santa Monica was the first stretch of beach the Angelenos ever colonised. Now it is a city of its own. This is custom-car headquarters of the universe. Bodyshops abound. Every kind of car ever made in the world can be seen in its original form on the streets of Los Angeles. Where the original has been lost, a ‘replicar’ replaces it. But in Santa Monica strange, twisted cars the world has never seen before are born out of troubled dreams. It must be the food. DEL TACO DRIVE-THRU HAMBURGERS.

  Beyond Santa Monica the Beach starts curving left at Pacific Palisades. By the time it gets to Malibu it is no longer for the general public, since the beach houses of the wealthy shut it off from easy access. But Pacific Palisades is also the place where Sunset Boulevard starts its long run inland. Now you are in amongst the hills and canyons where those who have really made it have their principal houses. In Bel Air and Beverly Hills those houses which are not completely screened by trees look like illustrations from a freshly printed encyclopaedia of every architectural style since the Minoan civilisation. Factory-fresh limousines and replicars are parked in the open, so that the sun can light them up.

  Even the most visible of these houses, however, is equipped to resist uninvited entry. Here the name Charles Manson is no joke. Gates have guard-houses and electric locks. There is closed-circuit television in the shrubbery. Lawns have spring-up spikes like a Vietcong ambush. These defensive measures should be kept in mind when you lay out two dollars for MAP AND GUIDE TO THE FABULOUS HOMES OF THE STARS and discover that ELKE SOMMER lives at 510 N BEVERLY GLEN, BEL AIR. Try walking in on her unannounced and you are likely to be greeted by an anti-tank missile coming down the driveway at chest height.

  By now it was time to stop, before I became like the dazed heroine of Joan Didion’s marvellous novel Play It As It Lays – the girl who drives on the freeways endlessly. We came home to Hollywood along Sunset Strip, which is really just a stretch of Sunset Boulevard that has let down its hair, not to say trousers. For a few strident blocks, THE ONLY TOTALLY NUDE LIVE STAGE SHOW ON THE STRIP vies for custom with MALE EXOTIC DANCERS. As S.J. Perelman deathlessly put it, De Gustibus Ain’t What Dey Used To Be.

  Blotto from having driven most of the day, we arrived back at Vidal’s house to find a gigantic white Bentley clinging to the near-vertical driveway. Dudley Moore had come to assess the Yamaha piano for tone and tune. In England he used to drive a blue Maserati which he tended to leave undusted so that girls could write WE LOVE YOU DUD on the roof. He played beautifully then and he still plays beautifully now. High from having just seen the rough-cut of his new movie, he filled the evening air with sweet melancholy. Perhaps he was just delaying the tricky moment when he would have to back the Bentley down the driveway. It was like the launching of the Great Eastern.

  Los Angeles might be impossible without a car but there is nothing to stop you going for a walk in Hollywood itself. There are footpaths, traffic lights and other useful pedestrian aids. It is true that William Faulkner once got arrested for walking but that was at night. Hollywood Boulevard is a good place to go in search of breakfast. The Chinese Theatre is still there, with the stars’ names and handprints frozen into the cement outside the foyer. The handwriting is almost invariably huge and illiterate, like a child’s drawings, while the handprints are the true signature. The movie industry was built by people who came up from nowhere.

  Despite rumours to the contrary, the studios have never stopped growing. Most of the television programmes that stop people going to the movies are made in the movie studios. All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish.

  The standard tour of Universal Studios is well worth the trouble. The place was a chicken farm when Carl Laemmle took it over in 1912. Now Universal City has 470 acres of tight-packed production facilities, including a back lot through which your tour tram climbs, dives and tunnels, while houses burn around you and bridges collapse beneath you. The tour is unflaggingly cute. I would have liked to have spent more time in the props warehouse, where five million props are classified in racks and shelves. Instead we had to watch a demonstration of the superhuman powers allegedly wielded by Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman, both of whom stem from Universal. So does the Incredible Hulk.

  So, once, did the Creature from the Black Lagoon, who used to emerge from one of the ponds on the back lot and press his rubberised attentions on Julie Adams. From Frankenstein and Dracula through to Jaws and Battlestar Galactica, Universal has always been a hot studio for monsters and special effects. I enjoyed my tour but often felt that I might as well have gone to Disneyland.

  So I went to Disneyland. Fleeing south-east on the Santa Ana freeway, the Cadillac ate the miles. The sun was bright and once again there was stock-car racing taking place all around us. A topless Volkswagen Beetle with a Chevrolet V-8 motor and wheels off an F1 racing car went past us like a low-flying aircraft, its driver scanning the sky for police helicopters. The freeways distort time and space to the point where Disneyland, when you arrive, seems like reality. Hector and Alphonse knew the place inside out. They pronounced Pirates of the Caribbean to be the best ride.

  Bobbing in a boat through tunnels and caves, you pass through mock sea-battles and watch mock towns being mock sacked. Mock pirates chase mock wenches. What will happen to the wenches when they are caught? The question is never asked. Totally innocent purpose is combined with infinitely elaborate execution. In the Haunted Mansion the hologram ghosts sing and dance around the graveyard while a hologram severed head speaks to you from inside a crystal ball. The technology is post-Einstein, the psychology preteen. There is a connection: only a thumb-sucker could ever have dreamed such things were possible.

  Hector and Alphonse persuaded me that without a ride on the Matterhorn my life would be incomplete. The Matterhorn is a high-speed switchback that loops around, when not hurtling through, an artificial mountain. Strapped into a drop-tank capsule I tried to think of other things while the G-force successively pushed my head through my collarbone, pulled it out again, and turned it back to front. Miraculously my Mickey Mouse ears stayed on, but I didn’t dare open my eyes, lest something worse than what I was imagining was taking place. When I finally drummed up the courage to take a look, we were heading back in the Cadillac for dinner at Carlos and Charlie’s on Sunset Strip. Plastic ears humming in the wind, I was ready for the heavy action.

  June 16, 1979

  Postcard from Los Angeles

  2 Even with Uncle’s Dogs

  CREWED by my boy assistants Hector and Alphonse, the canary-yellow 1964 drop-head Cadillac delivered me at Carlos and Charlie’s restaurant on Sunset Strip. The doorman looked askance at the Mickey Mouse ears which I had acquired at Disneyland and forgotten to take off. Airily I removed them and tossed them behind me into where the car would have been if the car-hop had not already driven it away. Carlos and Charlie’s is currently one of the fashionable places to eat, if you discount the fact that by the time you have heard that a place is fashionable it isn’t fashionable any more. It doesn’t matter anyway. Good food is plentiful in Los Angeles. If you want to gawk at movie stars, you can always go to the movies.

  Carlos and Charlie’s specialises in Mexican food. Presumably Carlos looks after the kitchen while Charlie counts the money. Mexican cuisine places a lot of emphasis on the heat factor. You take a hot tortilla, drop it, pick it up, fill it with assorted meats, top if off with various hot sauces, roll it tight, and bite one end of it while the contents fall out of the other end into your lap. Hector and Alphonse introduced me to a pepper called the jalapeño. No bigger than your little finger, it just lies there innocently like a failed gherkin, but it goes off in your mouth like a petrol bomb. I thought the sun was coming up in my throat. Citizens of Mexico who accidently eat a jalapeño plunge immediately into the Rio Grande and swim to the United States, slowed down only by the drag of
their open mouths.

  After I had been put out with foam I was loaded into the back of the Cadillac and driven through forests of neon to a disco called Osko’s. The Cadillac drew narrow looks of appreciation from the car-hops. But they still parked it around the back instead of positioning it prominently near the front door alongside the Rolls-Royces and Mercedes which had been chosen for that honour. Style counts, but the house has its prestige to think of. Hector and Alphonse bought the Cadillac from an outfit called RENTAWRECK for less than the price of a new Mini. Cheap is cheap no matter how you polish it.

  Osko’s was full of dark sound fighting to get out. Tiny bulbs set into narrow slits in the floor lit up in sequence, chasing one another like particles in an accelerator. An amplified combo stamped out a trip-hammer beat at a volume calculated to burst John Travolta’s pimples. You didn’t have to dance. The floor danced for you. It was on springs. Ladies were not allowed to wear open-toed shoes, lest their writhing partners descend from shoulder-height and flatten a pedal digit into something that could be presented in court as evidence of negligence on the part of the management. But at least ladies were allowed to wear shoes of some kind. In almost every disco except Osko’s what you have to wear is roller-skates. Cher, Bono and other stars have their own roller disco every Monday night: Jon Voight is supposed to be the greatest thing on eight wheels. Tomorrow roller-skates will give way to skis.

  Then it was tomorrow. In my motel, the Casa Nervosa, the TV set woke me up to tell me that Captain Video was dead. In the 1950s I had seen every episode of Captain Video, a movie SF serial with such a low budget that the hero and the heavy shared the same spaceship, only the nose and tail being switched to indicate the change of owner. Captain Video had been played by Al Hodge, who later on, as the newsreader put it, ‘had trouble getting parts’. Hodge had been found dead in a motel. Nobody came to claim the body. The announcement was a momentary acknowledgment of inexorable fate. Such lapses into gravity are uncommon in a city where the usual idea of tragedy is the hideous prospect of paying a dollar a gallon for gasoline.

  Ever since Lana Turner was discovered engaged in the construction of a banana split, it has been axiomatic that any actor can get the big break. All she or he has to do is be in Los Angeles. The result is that most of the world’s actors are in Los Angeles. Actresses who take jobs as waitresses are far more likely to find themselves waiting on other actors than on producers. The actors will have their heads buried in magazines like Casting News, whose Actors’ Advice Column is hosted by Dennis Lamour. Q: IF I’M IN A SCENE HOW CAN I DO A GOOD JOB IF THE OTHER PERSON DOESN’T RELATE? ISOLATED, L.A. Dear Isolated: Use their impenetrability as a catalyst for your character’s underlying feelings. This could be anger, sadness, impotence, hatred frustration, etc. A closed performance might mangle a scene, but your emotions, your work, your life, can still shine. In Los Angeles there are thousands of Isolateds desperately trying to make their lives shine while the other person goes on not relating.

  For the actress, while she is still young and looks good, there is always another way out. It isn’t exactly theatre or the movies, but on the other hand it isn’t exactly pornography. FEMALE ORIENTAL MODELS eighteen and over are needed for nude figure modeling for European publications. No porno. Experience not necessary. All sizes OK. Models will work directly with producers. Call Mr Pimpa, (213) 462-3455. Working directly with producers could mean anything, but in this case it probably means what it says. As for Mr Pimpa, at least he’s got a telephone number.

  Down among the real pornography, names and addresses are harder to trace. For 50 cents I bought the entrée into the hard-core section of a big bookshop on Santa Monica Boulevard. The stuff on the racks had to be seen to be believed. Once seen and believed, it quickly numbed the senses. I found it more difficult than ever to understand Lord Longford’s agitation when faced with evidence of the tawdriness of human dreams. My own reaction was an overwhelming desire to lie down on the floor and go to sleep. VIRGINS FOR THE CARDINAL. SLUT FOR THE CRUSADERS. SLAVE TO THE SADISTIC WOODSMAN. EVEN WITH UNCLE’S DOGS. NAZI FILE (Forced to submit to the Nazi dogs!) NAZI TORTUE SHACK.

  Literature for male homosexuals varied in tone. At one end of the scale there were Gordon Merrick’s ‘stories of Pete and Charlie’. Shyly equipped with titles like The Lord Won’t Mind and One for the Gods (‘A novel of Charlie and Pete – once more and forever!’) these featured pastel cover illustrations of clean-cut young men holding hands. At the other end of the scale naked bruisers in steel helmets and hob-nailed boots were jumping up and down on each other’s faces. For studs, there were magazines showing prostrate ladies being penetrated at all points and attempting to indicate gratitude with their eyes.

  It might sound like paradox-mongering to say so, but there is something innocent about the supposition that happiness can be found by gratifying the body’s wishes. It is certain that misery is to be found by not gratifying them, but beyond that nobody except a child can be sure. The Angelenos seem sure, and therefore childish, but it must be admitted that they have good excuse. Living in the climate and circumstances of Eden, they can be forgiven for behaving as if Los Angeles were the only reality and the rest of the world a dream.

  In that sense Los Angeles is the world’s biggest provincial town. But the sophisticate’s confident scorn tends to become muted with proximity. You can’t be in town two days without feeling the urge to take better care of yourself, drink more orange juice, run five miles before breakfast, do something about that wilting bicep, live for ever. It is but a short step to your first face-lift. Suddenly it seems a crime to be unhealthy. In his enthralling book Arnold: the Education of a Bodybuilder, Arnold Schwarzenegger quotes Plato on the subject. ‘Plato wrote that man should strive for a balance between the mind and the body.’ There is something to it, even if you can’t help wondering what Arnold’s mind must look like if his body is balanced by it. Plato would have jumped out of his sandals at the mere thought of a human being ever looking like Arnold – i.e., like a brown condom full of walnuts.

  To Stone Canyon for lunch with Ken and Kathleen Tynan. It was through country like this that Philip Marlowe drove Lindsay Marriott to his appointment with death in Farewell, My Lovely. The canyons were lonely in those days. Now there is no real-estate left to sell. But there are still plenty of trees. The Tynans served lunch al fresco. I eyed the Mexican salad warily, in case a jalapeño should be lurking incognito behind a lettuce leaf. But everything tasted delicious. The soft breeze took the sting out of the sunlight. The talk ranged far and wide. I could stand a lot of this. I started to be a bit sorry about having to go home. It was easy to see why the Tynans had settled in so well. It would have been no use pointing out, for the hundredth time, that what the London theatre needs more than anything else is for Kenneth Tynan to go through it like an avenging angel.

  The awkward truth about LA is that although it dares you to laugh at it, you can’t. No free person can afford to mock Los Angeles, since liberty is its primary impulse. Not even Forest Lawn is beneath contempt. EVERYTHING AT TIME OF SORROW. There are in fact two main Forest Lawns, one in the Hollywood Hills and the other at Glendale. The one at Glendale is the crazier. People of a literary turn of mind have always found the place easy to satirise, principally because the Builder had a unique touch with the English language. It is hard to remain unmoved when reading the Builder’s Creed carved in immortal stone. FOREST LAWN SHALL BE A PLACE WHERE LOVERS NEW AND OLD SHALL LOVE TO STROLL AND WATCH THE SUNSET’S GLOW. Such prose shall turn the unwary reader’s bowels to water.

  After your first few minutes in Forest Lawn you find yourself solemnly vowing never to be seen dead there. Plainly The Loved One was not a novel but a straightforward documentary. But before you pull your coat over your head and run for the exit, you simply must see the ‘Last Supper’ window. ‘Located in the Memorial Court of Honour in the Memorial Terrace of the Great Mausoleum, this radiant stained glass re-creation of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece
is shown with a dramatic narrative daily on regular schedules.’

  While the radiant stained glass re-creation waits patiently behind plush curtains, the dramatic narrative is imparted by a disembodied, sepulchral voice-over of teeth-rattling resonance. The dramatic narrative consists of a long and involved story about how Dr Hubert Eaton enlisted the talents of every glass-stainer in Europe. At first everything went well. But then there was a hitch. Three times the image of Judas refused to form. Dr Hubert Eaton was on the verge of scrubbing the whole deal. But then word came through from Europe. Judas had jelled! Iscariot was intact! The stained glass re-creation of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece was at last complete! At this point in the dramatic narrative the dramatic narrator pauses dramatically. The plush curtains roll back, revealing a stained glass re-creation before which Leonardo himself, were he still with us, could do nothing but set fire to his own beard in silent tribute.

  The same chapel that houses the stained glass whatsit is also a repository for copies of almost every statue Michelangelo ever carved. Before being outraged, you need to take stock of what you are being outraged at. The copies are micrometrically perfect. Only their clean finish serves to distinguish them from the originals. What is ridiculous is the way they have been torn from their historical context and placed in another context which has no history at all. To see sculptures by Michelangelo lovingly deployed against a background of such transcendental hideousness is enough to make you burst out crying. But what kind of tears? In part they are tears of annoyed envy that anybody could combine so much technical know-how with so much crassness. What incenses you is the airy thoroughness with which the old world has been plundered of its images and left behind. Forest Lawn is the clearest proof that Los Angeles is the whirlpool of the world, a geopolitical jacuzzi, a maelstrom in which all the styles and cultures have come to drown in one another’s arms.