Howard, what an opportunity he gave her! The man was paranoid and sexist and domineering and all the things women are supposed to hate, but he was a genius and au fond, he was a dear. At least until disease got him. If you judge men by the women who love them, Howard was the top of the heap. Men feared him; women loved him. She flew with him and slept with him and left him in time. Just in time.
She’d stumbled along for a half century without a thought to what came next and now had no clue. Men? Marriage? Middle Age? Menopause? The horrible Ms. Women have a dozen things to think about before they get in bed with a man, and finally she was free of them. She’d lost an ovary because of a stupid fling with Hans, the musclebound lifeguard at the beach club she’d brought home because why not, and she was drunk from too many daiquiris and forgot she’d put in a Tampax and then Hans banging away on top of her and the next day she thought her whole insides had ruptured. The look on the doctor’s face said it all.
She never flew anymore, hated her job, which was all paperwork and men in business suits. A few years back she could have gone for a commercial pilot’s license. God, how she’d love to fly those new Boeing giants for TWA. Howard would have swung it for her. First woman WASP, why not the first woman airline pilot? Now she’d have to leave Hughes. How could she work for a company she was suing? Howard was no use, turned into a demented invalid, putative head of a company he’d never heard of and didn’t even know how to pronounce.
Leaving Hughes Aircraft meant she’d have to leave Playa del Rey. It was too far to the foundation offices downtown. Too bad they’d scrapped the trolley. Terry’s house was the one in which she’d been happiest, but she didn’t need two stories and three bedrooms and three bathrooms when no one ever stayed with her except guys like Hans. Cal came down sometimes, and Lizzie and Joe stopped by on their way to Westport but never stayed. Didi wouldn’t set foot in the house. The house on the hill with the view from Malibu to Catalina was the beautiful painting that no one ever saw.
The showdown with Summa was coming, coming even though nobody knew what Summa was, not even Howard. They, it, whatever it was, had taken over the building on Romaine Street and was writing letters to everyone signed by names she’d never seen before, always with the comment underneath: “(for Howard Hughes).”
It was nonsense. Summa was acting on its own to sell Hughes Aircraft and turn Playa del Rey into Karl-Marx-Allee because Howard wasn’t there to stop them and no one could find him and it wouldn’t matter if they could because Howard was crazy! Mel Cobb said Howard had become like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, Howard’s favorite movie: Remember me for what I was, not what I am. At first he’d thought Howard loved the movie because of Bill Holden, another old pal, but it wasn’t that at all. It was Norma Desmond, who was a wreck.
If all of that wasn’t enough, then guilt came and took up residence.
Why should she feel guilty about her mother and daughter? Maybe she hadn’t been the best daughter, but Nelly hardly noticed. As for Didi, she was unhappy so they sent her off to Bel Air and Westlake so she could be happy with bisque dolls and charge accounts and sandwiches with the crusts cut off. She, Maggie, did it. Terry didn’t know what to make of this sulky little thing but would have made it work. Why did life have to be so messy? Easy to blame the parents for everything, but that only works for so long. After a while, it’s on you.
But was guilt such a bad thing? Maybe guilt is like pain, a necessary warning that something is off and needs fixing. If it’s your body you seek medicine; if it’s your conscience, you make amends. Maybe guilt helps you back onto the right path: the oil wells destroy the coast, but lead to the Mull Foundation, which brings back the beaches. Los Angeles was even trying to make amends with Owens Valley for stealing its water. You defeat guilt by making it useful. It was too late to make it up to her mother, but maybe not too late for Didi.
There would be no guilt and no amends over Playa del Rey because Summa would not get away with it. They had not torn down the Mull oil derricks to replace them with Summa concrete. They had a letter from Howard stating his intentions, and Howard, not Summa, owned the land. Howard’s signature on the contract with the Mull Foundation was his real signature, not the forged signature of those who were drugging him to death so they could take over everything he’d created when he was gone.
When he was gone . . .
She wondered: Did he have a will?
Chapter 43
She was neither the most popular girl at Westlake nor the most popular Tri Delt at UCLA. She was too shy and self-absorbed to make friends easily. She had a circle of girls who were more or less like her, but it was a small circle. Didi’s strong suit, though not necessarily with females, was that she had become a striking young woman. Like her mother, she had dark hair and dark eyes and a perfect Garbo face. She was as tall as Maggie with a body that men liked to watch. She’d had small roles in school plays at Westlake and dreamt of playing Eliza in Shaw’s Pygmalion, but her drama teacher never would have taken the risk. She was fine in rehearsals, but could not act in front of an audience. He’d seen other girls like that. It was a pity, for Didi was a joy to look at, but the stage is no place for anyone with a fear of failure.
Her picture dancing with Kenny van Swerigen had been prominent in the Times society feature on the debutante ball at the Bel Air Country Club. Didi was radiant and Kenny handsome in his white dinner jacket. Finally, Nelly had a girl at the ball. She didn’t worry about Didi’s shyness. With all the things happening to their bodies, teenage girls are often like that. She’d been shy herself as a girl. She couldn’t have been prouder of her granddaughter, so hard to imagine this statuesque beauty as the fussy, stuffy, knobby-kneed little thing Maggie dropped off to live with her years before, whose feet didn’t quite reach the floor at the dining room table. She’d been such a careful little girl, so afraid of making a mistake, of saying something dumb or wrong. Westlake had been just the thing and Delta Delta Delta the perfect sorority at UCLA. Boys were attracted to the Tri Delt house like hummingbirds to honeysuckle.
For Didi’s UCLA graduation, Nelly planned a cocktail party. There was a dance at the club on graduation night, but the following Wednesday was perfect for something more intimate. Sixty invitations was not exactly intimate, but with Didi’s sorority friends and Nelly’s studio crowd it was the absolute minimum. Kenny van Swerigen had to be invited, though Nelly was not keen on him. He was polite and cute in his tuxedo and at least taller than Didi, but the boy was so very bland. Kind of Iowa bland, as she remembered back, people moving around silently in the sitting room with a dull look on their face like they were still out there with the cows. Kenny came from a good family, in the country club and Blue Book and the Junior League because Bruno van Swerigen was head of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine. Didi had known Kenny forever, but Nelly saw no oomph in the boy.
She hired Lester Jones whenever she entertained. Eddie had found him years ago, God knows where. He had to be fetched each time for he lived in Watts and didn’t drive, but Ralph, the chauffeur, knew the way. Lester wasn’t the greatest piano player, but knew everything, was accommodating to a fault, and wasn’t expensive. He made enough tips in the big brandy snifter on the piano that she probably didn’t need to pay him anything. Lester didn’t even mind playing on her Baldwin spinet, which she always had tuned for him, though the tuner hated it. “The sea air, the sea air,” he told her once. “Spinets are no good anyway the way the strings are bent around. Get yourself an upright—or a baby grand. A house like this deserves a baby grand.”
Promptly at six, the first cars pulled up Roscomare Road, the long, winding street running from the club up to the reservoir. Plenty of parking along Roscomare so Nelly never hired a valet. Ralph should have been back with Lester by six, but Wednesday rush-hour traffic can be bad. Didi was radiant and dashed out to greet the girls coming up the path, boys right behind. This wasn’t just a younger crowd, it was a
young and beautiful crowd with a touch of Hollywood because more than a few of the Tri Delts came from Hollywood families. Didi introduced Nelly to the Volker twins, two gorgeous redheads who’d been on the cover of Time magazine for their success on Password, a game show where they’d won for weeks, setting some kind of record. The story was that Frank Sinatra called the Tri Delt house and invited them to the Academy Awards. Both of them! Sinatra who was fifty if he was a day! Chiffon dresses, one lime, one powder blue, came just above their knees and the décolletage was maidenly modest. And such lovely pale skin! Redheads are so lucky!
And there was Maggie making a beeline for her daughter. Nelly loved seeing them together, so rare. With Howard Hughes’s disappearances Maggie had taken on more duties and seldom made it to Bel Air anymore. When she came, she came alone. After two dead husbands it was like she was giving up, Nelly thought, so unlike her. The Times photographer started snapping pictures. Maggie towered over her mother, and Didi was a bit taller than Maggie.
“Mother, get in the middle,” said Maggie.
“Never!” she said, pulling away. “I’ll look like a dwarf. You two stand together.”
“Would someone please hold this drink,” said Didi. “I don’t want to look sloshed.”
“Are you getting sloshed?” asked Maggie, taking the champagne flute and handing it to Nelly. “And that dress, my goodness!”
Didi’s black cocktail dress was shorter and dipped lower than the dresses of the other Tri Delts, but had more to hold it up. Nelly had wondered about the dress, too, which they’d picked out together at Bullock’s Westwood, but Nelly didn’t know about the call from Jonathan Schwartz, who was bringing someone with him with movie connections to meet Didi. Jonathan was a Hollywood lawyer and man-about-town whom Nelly knew from the dance studio. He’d been to Roscomare Road and had met Didi. He was a hustler, but you never knew. It was time for her granddaughter to get out in the world.
Didi leaned toward Maggie and whispered edgily, “Mother, stop being a mother. It’s a little late, don’t you think?”
“There’s your Aunt Liz,” said Maggie, ignoring the comment and waving to the door where Liz and Joe had just come in followed by Robby and a girl they didn’t know. Cal was a few steps behind. Nelly didn’t know what to make of the quarrel between Cal and Robby. She liked Robby well enough because he liked to talk about Eddie, which no one else ever did. She knew Didi couldn’t stand her cousin and wondered why she’d invited him. In any case, in any quarrel involving Cal, Nelly would stand with Cal, always had.
“No music,” said Joe. “Where’s my favorite piano player?”
“I have no idea,” said Nelly, who with time had accommodated herself to her socialist son-in-law. “Ralph left hours ago for Watts.”
“Watts, did you say?”
“That’s where Lester lives.”
“Some kind of police action in Watts I heard on the radio,” said Joe.
“Not tonight of all nights, please!” cried Nelly. “What will I do for music?”
“Someone will play,” said Joe. “Someone at these parties always can play.”
“Call for you, Miss Lizzie.” It was Iris, the maid, out from the kitchen where she was supervising the catering.
“This is Dominique,” said Robby, ignoring Didi and approaching his grandmother with a luscious girl on his arm.
When Didi had phoned to invite Lizzie and Joe, it was Robby who answered, Robby the vile cousin whose only virtue in her mind was that he’d gone away for so long. Lizzie wasn’t home, and Robby wouldn’t call Joe to the phone until she told him why she was calling so she had to invite him as well, hoping, of course, that he wouldn’t come. She’d hoped that Robby’s years of exile might have improved him, but, no. As children they’d hated each other, and the only improvement with age was that hatred had turned to contempt.
What Didi could never forgive—it had been chiseled into her hippocampus as an infant—was that Robby was vicious. The few horrible times they’d been put together as children, most often in the spare bedroom at Playa del Rey, Robby, two years older, would sneak over and pinch her until she started crying. By the time someone came in, he would have slipped back to bed pretending to be asleep. For years he’d found ways to torment her whenever they were together and shift the blame onto her. To her, he was mean and devious and probably a misogynist. She felt for any girl unfortunate enough to find herself with him. Robby’s opinion of his cousin was hardly better: To him she was weak and stupid.
They stood waiting for Dominique’s last name, but it was not offered. She looked as French as her name, but the accent was Midwestern flat. Lizzie had met her for the first time on the path outside. She hadn’t spoken to their son since he moved into his own place somewhere in West Hollywood. He’d apparently found a job, but no one knew anything about it.
“We’ve got to go,” said Lizzie, coming back from the phone with the Times photographer. “Something going on in Watts. They’re calling everyone in. Sammy has a car.”
“What’s up?” said Joe.
“Not sure. Trouble in South Central. Pulling in police from everywhere.”
“Ralph is somewhere down there,” said Nelly. “With my car! Lizzie, for heaven’s sake. At your age. What’s wrong with that newspaper!”
Lizzie ignored her mother. “Sorry Didi. Work calls. Bye everyone.”
“That’s my mother,” said Robby, who was not smiling.
“Ah,” said Nelly, reviving as other guests came in the door. “There’s Jonathan Schwartz. Who’s that with him?”
“I believe that would be Archie Zug,” said Joe.
“Who is . . .?”
“An agent I know from Universal.”
“I don’t believe he’s on the guest list.”
“I think he’s here for me, Granny,” said Didi.
Joe sighed. “I certainly hope not.”
Archie Zug was the Hollywood talent agent par excellence. His agency represented a good many of the top stars, but Archie was also known for developing talent, especially young female talent. Hollywood was a vortex, if not a maelstrom, for young females and had been since the movie industry arrived. Males, too, made their way west if they thought they had something, but the suck on females was greater because they had more to offer and more to gain. A young fellow off a Midwestern farm or from an Eastern blue-collar family could always step into Dad’s shoes when the time came, and if he had a college education, he might set his sights on a career in business. It was different for young women. Despite the gains they’d made during the war, the business world was closed to them unless they could type or work a switchboard. The situation wasn’t as bad as in places like Germany, where the tradition of Kinder, Küche, Kirche reached back to the Middle Ages, but it wasn’t good either. Home economics was still the most popular college major for co-eds, as they were called, and for more adventurous girls there was always nursing and teaching. Hardly a wonder that if a girl was attractive enough and had a little gumption she would set out for Hollywood.
The first thing they did off the train was visit a talent agency. They didn’t need an appointment. Just show up and let the agent have a good ogle from all angles. The girls generally fell into three groups. There were the ones away from home alone for the first time, and the agent’s job was to be surrogate comforter and father confessor. The second group was girls who didn’t need surrogates because they came equipped with mothers, who often saw beauty and talent where no one else did. For agents, mothers were something to be tolerated only if the girl had something truly special, like Judy Garland or Ginger Rogers.
Finally, there were the girls who came to the agent to escape their mothers, who had some sort of psychodynamic grudge against them for being too domineering or too successful. Think of the daughters of Mary Astor or Joan Crawford. Motherly success casts a long shadow over insecure daughters. Or maybe the
case was the opposite: Mother just didn’t give a damn. Sometimes mothers just can’t win.
♦ ♦ ♦
Nelly never saw her black Buick again. Lester Jones never played for her again because no one dared go to Watts to fetch him. Lizzie, the Times metro editor, returned home Thursday morning in a taxi, caught a nap and, frazzled, sat down with Joe for coffee. Joe had read the paper while she was sleeping, and nothing surprised him. It wasn’t the Marxist class struggle but the racial struggle that had gone on in America since emancipation. For decades it had been the problem of the East and the South and maybe the Midwest and Los Angeles hadn’t paid much attention. When blacks discovered the West after the war, real estate covenants, known as “redlining,” conveniently hid them away in their own part of town, mostly on Charlie Watts’s former ranch. Los Angeles still didn’t pay much attention. Watts became the city’s Harlem, where you didn’t go except maybe for the music, and everyone was fine with that. As the black population increased over the next two decades, Harlem West kept on growing. By 1965, with the new federal Civil Rights Act just passed, its people were sick of redlining and wanted out.
“How are you doing?” he asked his wife, who didn’t look too rested.
He could tell without asking, but asked anyway.
“Wait till I finish this coffee and I’ll tell you.”
He passed her the paper. “The whole front section is Watts.”
“Those guys did a hell of a job.”
“You mean you guys.”
“Everybody, Joe. I mean we were mobilized. Every reporter, every editor, every photographer worked all night. Two special editions.”
“I heard on KHJ this morning that it’s getting worse. More dead, houses burning. Police chief called it a revolution. Says it’s like fighting the Viet Cong.”
“More like an uprising than a revolution.”
Blood and Oranges Page 32
