by Steve Hodel
The Beverly Hills Hotel, a stately pink-and-green landmark at the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Beverly Drive, is more like an elegant golf or country club than a hotel. In the middle 1950s, it was still one of the last bastions of the old Hollywood aristocracy. It was into this gentlemen's club lobby that I and my two brothers walked, feeling all eyes in the hotel staring at us, making our way to the front desk and holding Koko tightly on her leash. The dog, whose grandsire had been national champion and judged "Best of Show," knew how to perform on a leash. "Koko, sit," I ordered her once we reached the desk. And the dog obeyed. The desk clerk smiled. "Can I help you gentlemen?" I tried to hide my nervousness. "We would like to see John," I said. He suddenly became more guarded and looked down at me with peering eyes. He asked, "Who?"
My older brother Michael responded, "Mr. Huston. We are here to see John Huston." The clerk became more guarded now. "Who might I say is calling?" Michael answered again: "Tell him that it's the Hodels, Michael, Steven, and Kelvin. And Koko." Upon hearing her name the dog began wagging her tail furiously. The desk clerk placed a quick call on the house phone, looked surprised, nodded, and we were escorted to the elevator, which took us up to the penthouse suite. The elevator door opened and in we went.
We hadn't seen John Huston in over two years. We knew him from the Franklin House, where he and his father, Walter, had been regular social guests at many of the parties. Standing there now in the Beverly Hills Hotel, thin and tall, he looked to me to be a seven-foot tower as his booming voice greeted us. "Hello, boys. And who might this be?" Kelvin answered first: "She's our dog, Koko, she's a boxer." John instantly caught the nuance in her name and laughed loudly. "Koko — is that for a double knockout? K.O.-KO.?" Michael, who had named her, was impressed. "Yes, that's right. You're the only person that has ever figured it out. We always have to tell other people." John laughed even harder.
Excited by hearing her name called out so many times, Koko ran to the center of the suite, squatted on the plush white carpet as if it were high brush on a vacant lot, and took a dump. The three of us stood watching in disbelief, then a loud voice, roaring with laughter from the couch behind us, said, "I'll get it." The tall handsome dark-haired man, obviously in even better spirits than John, staggered to a bathroom and came back with a large roll of toilet paper. He dropped to his knees near where Koko had squatted and started to clean up the mess. John Huston said, "Boys, I want you to meet Greg Peck. When he's not cleaning up dogshit, he acts," and both roared with laughter. John took the envelope from my shirt, read its contents, walked over to a desk, wrote out a check and a note, placed them both back in the envelope, and returned it to me.
"Here, Steven, give this to your mother," he said. The big man with the big voice walked us back down to the lobby and out to the waiting taxi. Huston handed the driver some bills. "Here, cabbie, take them home." And in less than an hour we were standing before our mother, who had come out to meet us at the front door when she saw the taxi pull up. Before I could get out of the taxi, she grabbed the envelope from my hand, opened it, and smiled. "Five hundred dollars. We can pay the rent and we can get some food. You boys can go to the movies and I can buy a new coat." For us, this meant we could stay in Pasadena and not have to flee the sheriff in the middle of the night.
Over the next few months, Mother's drinking became even heavier, and her binges seemed to last longer. Instead of five-day drunks, they would extend to ten, but we had friends now and stayed overnight at their houses as much as we could. Our schoolmates' parents seemed to understand and often fed and housed us for a few days as family when they noticed we hadn't changed our clothes and hadn't eaten. But even that didn't help, because John Huston's money quickly ran out and we had to move again.
It was late one warm summer night in 1954, about midnight, when I entered our newly rented home on Lake Street. Mother had told us that her gypsy spirit demanded a change in houses, hut we knew it was because the previous landlord had given her notice after three months' late rent payments. Mother had found a new friend of hers to move us, someone we had never seen before. A big man with an old truck, he had large greasy hands and dressed in blue overalls like the picture of Farmer John on a package of sausages. The move took us two days of back-and-forth, but we finally got all our stuff to the new house.
The electricity still hadn't been turned on that midnight as I felt my way cautiously through the maze of boxes in the living room. The house was silent. "Mother," I called out. But there was no answer. I yelled louder, "Mother, are you here?" I could hear muffled sounds in the bedroom and made my way to the door. I opened it. "Mother?" I could barely make out both figures on the bed. "Mother, are you all right?"
I ran to her through the darkness. The large ugly man who had moved us was on top of her, his clothes in a pile on the floor. "Get off, leave her alone!" I grabbed the nearest object — a lamp — and began hitting him on the back with it. He turned and slapped me open-handed, knocking me across the room. "Get the fuck out of here, boy, before I really hurt you." Then I heard Mother's voice, slurred and sloppy: "How dare you touch my son! Get out, get out of this house!" They were both drunk. "I'll get out," the man hollered, "but don't you ever ask for money or help from me again. You and your high airs and fancy clothes, you ain't nothing but a whore, lady, and not even a good one."
I watched in fear and silence as the dark figure fumbled with his clothes, dressed, and staggered toward the door. He stopped, turned toward me, his voice filled with rage: "Just so you know, boy, your mother — she's a lousy fuck!" He left. Mother pulled the blanket over herself, lit a cigarette, and said, "He's a bad man, Steven. He's a terrible man. I should have never let him move us."
I looked at her lying there drunk, barely able to hold her cigarette as she struggled to sit up. Then she collapsed in a heap, cigarette and all. I was filled with hatred. "He's right, Mother!" I screamed. "You are a whore. You are a drunk and a whore! I don't want you for my mother. I hate you. I never want to see you again. Ever! I want to go live with my father. I want to go to the Philippines and live with him. If you don't let me, I'll run away and never come back!" Her voice got louder now, and she began to yell back at me. "You don't know! You don't know! Your father! Your father is a monster! He is a terrible man and he's done terrible things!"
Her voice cracked from the intensity of her screaming. "Your father pretends to be a doctor and a healer, but he's really insane! If you really knew the truth you'd hate your father!"
"You're just saying that because he left you," I cried. "Because he hated you too, like I do. He hated your drinking and your lies."
I ran, not as much from the house as from her words, and for four days stayed with a friend. I returned only when I had made a promise to myself to leave the family as soon as I could figure out a way to get to my father. And when I did return, I found Mother weak, shaky, but at least sober. In front of all three sons she promised that she was quitting drinking, that she would never "touch another drop." We'd heard that a hundred times before, but we were gullible and believed her each time.
When we were alone later that night, I asked her what she meant when she said those things about Father. She looked at me and said, "What things?" I told her what she had said. Her already pale face turned ashen as she said, "I never said those things." I stared at her in disbelief. "You did, Mother, you called him a monster and said he was insane. Those were your exact words."
Now there was real fear in her voice. "Steven," she said, "sometimes I say things when I've been drinking that are fantasies, make-believe. They are made up things, like bad dreams that come to people when they are drunk. Have you heard the word DT? It stands for delirium tremens, and it comes to people when they drink a lot. People see and say imaginary things. Maybe that's what it was, but whatever I said is not true. Your father is a brilliant doctor, a good man, and maybe I was just upset because we have no money and because you said you hated me."
She put her arms around me and he
ld me tight. "I want you to forget about such things. They are ugly and unreal. What is real is that I love you, and I promise you I will never drink again and everything will be back to normal." I looked at her pale face, her shaking hands and sad eyes filled with tears, which I took to be tears of remorse. And in that moment I believed that what she had told me about Father she had said because she was drunk. If it was because of what she called the DTs, then that's what it had to be. And if she would truly quit drinking, then maybe we would be like other families. Maybe we too could be normal. The thought of her quitting drinking forever was all I wanted and needed. It was the only thing that my brothers and I cared about, and now it was going to happen. "I love you too, Mother," I said.
Of course it didn't happen, and we were soon evicted again. In fact, we moved so much during the middle 1950s that we learned not to unpack the boxes because we knew we wouldn't be there very long. From Pasadena we moved to Santa Monica. Next came the San Fernando alley and Van Nuys High for me for two semesters, and then Glendale. Suddenly I was sixteen and again Dad stopped by to see us out of the blue. He must have discovered it was my birthday, because he brought me a gift. I unwrapped the white tissue paper and discovered a Tinkertoy set. Dad hadn't the faintest notion I was now sixteen.
And then it was November 1958, my seventeenth birthday. I finally felt free. I couldn't wait to leave. Even though Mother urged me to wait until my graduation the following June, I couldn't. I wanted out. I convinced my mother to sign the authorization papers allowing me to leave high school. Three weeks later I joined the Navy. Now that I was grown up, I promised myself I would find some way to see Father. I didn't know how I would pull it off, but joining the Navy seemed as good a way as any.
Subic Bay
IN JANUARY 1959, I started Navy boot camp in San Diego, and after basic training was transferred a few miles north to hospital corpsman school for six months' medical training at Balboa Hospital. I told myself I wanted to pursue medicine and become a doctor like my father when I was discharged, and figured this could give me a solid foundation before entering pre-med. As a doctor, maybe I could finally establish a relationship with my father, complete a part of myself that had been short-circuited by the trial and divorce.
I knew very little about Father's new life. I knew that while in Hawaii he had studied to become a psychiatrist and had taught at the territorial university, then he had gone on to Manila to a new life with his new wife in the Philippines. Although Mother spent most of her time drunk and bitter, she felt justified in complaining that Dad, who rarely sent any money to support the family, was now rumored to have married a very wealthy woman. "Her family owns a large sugar plantation," Mother told us. "She belongs to a family that is supposedly close to Marcos and the political bigwigs of the Philippines."
At the end of 1958, Father and his wife were living in Manila and had four children: two sons and two daughters, half-siblings whom I had never met. Mother told us that Father was "president of a large market research company, and is now very wealthy and living like a raja, emperor, or king."
To be sure, Mother's descriptions of Father's lifestyle had made me hate him all the more for abandoning us. She had nothing, and he had everything. She lived from week to week in squalor and poverty; he lived in comfort in some great palace with servants and cooks, who, in my mind's eye, sounded great exotic brass gongs at dinnertime. Father had sent almost nothing in the way of money or support as we were growing up. After Mother's third or fourth plea when things were critical, he would occasionally wire some "emergency funds" to "tide us over." But there was nothing on a regular basis, nothing of his own volition, nothing from his heart to her or us. No note that said, "Here, Dorero, this is for you and the children. Tell them I love them." There was only the Tinkertoy set when I was sixteen. And now, by way of the U.S. Navy, I was setting out to find him.
My first billet after corpsman school, as I'd hoped and expected the fates would arrange it, was a two-year assignment to a small hospital just outside Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines. This posting was not something I had arranged, or would have even been able to arrange, but I had thrown myself into the currents of life, hoping that they would bring me and my father together. Now that it was about to happen, I had mixed emotions. But I told myself that this was nothing I had consciously arranged. I was only a seaman apprentice who wasn't really qualified to ask questions, or, for that matter, to think any thoughts. A sailor's job was to go and do.
Once I was in the Navy and on my own, I soon discovered that if there is a gene predisposing you to boozing, my introduction to life in the military turned it on like a light switch. It took less than a month in the small Navy town of Olongapo, just outside the huge U.S. military installation at Subic Bay, for me to water that gene. Three dollars U.S. bought me twelve scotches, and five dollars U.S. bought me Toni, a nineteen-year-old Filipina beauty. I got drunk and I got laid for cash. The dances with her at the Club Oro to Johnny Mathis's "Misty" were free.
And now it was time for Dad. He was fifty-two when I first arrived to meet him after so many years. We were strangers and I didn't know how I really felt about my own father. Did I love him or hate him? Both, I guessed. Mother's propaganda over the past ten years had given me mixed messages. She had glorified his intellect and doctoring skills, telling me that few knew his true genius as a doctor, which was as a diagnostician. At the same time she had vilified him for abandoning his children. Our first reunion took place a month after I arrived in the Philippines. It was a Saturday luncheon at the
Army-Navy Club on Manila Bay. I wore my Navy blues, he wore a white sharkskin suit, and while I was wilting in the tropics, he sat there, cool and collected, not a hair on his head out of place. Father's appearance surpassed the legends and visions I had woven around him in my mind. Though at six foot one he was an inch shorter than me, he seemed to tower over me, physically as well as in his demeanor. He was strikingly handsome and as strong as if he were in his twenties, and he behaved as if he wielded the power of the universe with his fingertips. Immaculately dressed, he immediately conveyed to one and all that he was not only a man of wealth, but a commanding presence. But it was more than that: it was the force behind his words that completely dominated and controlled every situation down to the smallest detail. Whether he was making a major financial decision for his company that would involve millions of pesos, or was simply ordering a glass of iced tea, it was the same.
Dad's arrogance, I soon came to see, put him at the center of his own universe and demanded his listener's complete attention. Women loved him for that power and presence. Men respected and feared him for it. As for me, I was intimidated but not fearful like the others, whom I watched kowtow to him, no matter how outrageous his demands. My relationship with him was cautious, polite, but not obsequious. In the two years I spent in the Philippines and in my father's presence, I saw how he dismissed most people out of hand with an arrogant "Leave us." But he treated me differently. He and I were strangers, but I was blood, and maybe that made the difference.
I also got to meet the children from Dad's new life, my young half-brothers and sisters who at that time were about five, six, seven, and eight years old. All four of them were very beautiful and at the sight of the tall American sailor whom Dad introduced as their brother they laughed and giggled, murmuring in both Tagalog and English.
I also discovered that Dad and his wife, my stepmother,* were living in separate residences. She and the children lived in a large home in a Beverly Hills-type neighborhood in the suburbs of Manila. Dad was living and had his offices at the Admiral Apartments on Manila Bay in an impressive five-room layout that had been General Douglas McArthur's headquarters after his return to the Philippines. If it was good enough for the general it was good enough for the emperor. The operation ran smoothly and efficiently, with the help of an omnipresent "manager" named Diana, a beautiful Chinese woman who appeared to be in her late twenties and spoke as if she had been educated at
one of the Seven Sisters schools.
Throughout my stint at the Navy hospital, Dad remained aloof and private, completely absorbed in his own world. Hortensia, whom I later discovered had originally met my father at a 1948 party at the Franklin House, was ever the gracious hostess, welcoming me into her home as family. During this period, Father spent most of his time building his market research company, traveling throughout Asia and Europe on business, and our brief encounters were perfunctory, emotionally shallow, revealing none of the intimate details about him that I was looking for. Besides having verified through my own personal observation that my father was a successful, wealthy, politically connected, charming, multitalented, charismatic womanizer, who was also an overbearing, arrogant, egotistical control freak, I discovered very little about the inner man. What was truly troubling, however, and most confusing to me, had little to do with his personality, because, whatever his strengths and shortcomings, I could accept them.
It was his internal blindness that troubled me, his obliviousness to the needs and concerns of anyone around him. He was a psychiatrist, trained to probe the needs of his patients. Yet he was emotionally inaccessible to his family, a fortified castle unto himself, with a moat around his heart.
As a young man and his son, I respected his power, his authority, and his accomplishments. I took great pride when I was in his presence, glory by association. But when I wasn't with him, away from his world, I could sense his sadness, his solitude, his emotional pain, and knew it was dark and ran very deep. I also believed that he would never speak or share that secret pain with anyone, personally or professionally, and that was the saddest reality of all for me. When I left him a year and a half after my arrival, I was less certain about the man than when I had first arrived.
As the end of my enlistment was approaching, I was assigned to the Mobile Construction Battalion of Seabees stationed out of Port Hueneme in Ventura, California. I had become my mother's son rather than my father's. Maybe it was the thirsty Irish genes that had played themselves out during her long binges while I was growing up, or maybe I simply learned to drink by example. But drink I did, and lots of it. "Johnnie Walker" became my new best friend.
