Gladys Reunited

by Sandi Toksvig

  Ripley was a legend when I was a child. My brother and I used to devour his Believe It or Not books in which the curios of life were paraded before an aghast audience. In his Hollywood museum many of these oddities are on display. There is, for example, the wreath made from human hair which was designed to hang as a morbid memento of past love. Apparently it was not uncommon in Victorian times to make such a souvenir from the hair of a loved one who had presumably failed to respond to a final rectal smoke or whatever. The wreath was first placed on the coffin of the now bald departed person, and then displayed over the mantelpiece in the sitting room.

  I drifted past photos of the Ubangi tribe, the world’s tallest man, looked at a bikini also made of human hair, and the two-headed skeleton of a human baby. I passed a sign which told me that according to Dr Jelle Atema, a biologist at some lab in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, the lobster has a taste system a million times more sensitive than a human’s. I thought about Barbara in Maine performing high colonic lavage on my lobster. Of myself, cracking and sucking on creatures who ironically have a palate ideally suited to selecting the accompanying wine.

  Oddities from the past, but I was aware of ones from the present. The New York Times was running a story about a woman called Sharon who lives on a mountain in Idaho. She had decided that because of terrorist threats she would not fly again. Of course she hadn’t flown for twenty-two years but that, it seemed, was not the point.

  Outside, on the boulevard at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, a big crowd had gathered to watch some filming. Muhammad Ali was receiving a star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame. There were many cameras watching the great boxing hero, now shaky with Parkinson’s. I couldn’t think of a single film he had made. Ali’s sign was not to be placed on the ground but rather to hang on a wall. Apparently he didn’t want anyone walking over him. Oh, to have the power to stop that happening.

  On the other side of the road, the entire height of a large office building was bordered by a large sign which read Scientology. Many men were busy white-washing the front wall of the building.

  I am not a scientology fan and thought it rather an apt metaphor for what was no doubt happening inside the building. Throughout the town religion was on offer. The place was awash with self-realisation fellowships and even the magazine in my hotel room described LA as ‘The single best destination for searchers the world over to come discover their dreams. Often these dreams have involved movies themselves, with people aspiring to become successful actors, writers, directors. However, other dreams abound, as people seek spiritual answers and inner fulfilment.’

  Great writers drawn to the movie money, like Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley, stayed to seek a more peaceful inner life with the likes of Swami Prabhavananda from India and Manly P. Hall, a handsome fellow who dressed somewhere between a mystic and a big-band leader. Everywhere, the separation between the celluloid, the temporal and the spiritual dream was hard to spot. Even the Christian Science Reading Room advertised that it had ‘movie reviews’ in the window as if that might draw someone m.

  They say Los Angeles is ‘the city with the greatest religious diversity worldwide’ and I think it is all connected to the weather. Even nearing winter the skies were blue and the sun beat down pleasantly on my back. Perfect for D. W. Griffith and the like to roll cameras, but warm enough for the out-of-work actor to think about spiritual needs. In New York they’d be too busy thinking they might freeze to death.

  I didn’t feel I had the energy to search for eternal truth. I was tired and, anyway, I had decided truth was a slippery devil. There was a story in the local paper about the actress Gwyneth Paltrow. The item claimed that Miss Paltrow is keen to cleanse her body and this purge includes coffee. It was the sort of story you expect in California where health ‘issues’ rule, cheese is considered a lethal weapon and you don’t drink water with bubbles because it gives you cellulite. Anyway, this cleansing had apparently made Miss Paltrow hypersensitive and she now can’t drink out of a cup which has even just once had coffee in it. She was at some event and her assistant was reportedly running about the place looking for a virginal cup. Was it true? I hope not. I hope as I write this Gwyneth is laughing her head off and chugging caffeine out of one of those mugs with rings of coffee stain inside them which the rest of us have at home.

  Tears are the safety valve of the heart when too much pressure is applied.

  Ginger, 1972 Yearbook, Mamaroneck High School

  I had actually managed not only to speak to Ginger but arrange to meet her. My last Gladys, and finally I was contriving to organise things on my own. Ginger had moved to Los Angeles after graduating from Yale University in drama. She had always wanted to be an actress but then things had taken a detour and she had spent some time in Midwest married bliss. Now she was back in Tinseltown and Sue had managed to get her address. Ginger was the oldest of the Gladys students. The mark of a senior, a graduating high school student, in the Mamaroneck yearbook was that they had an individual photo printed with a quote of their own choosing. The one about tears being the safety valve of the heart was Ginger’s. I never gave it much thought but I realise now that it wasn’t exactly cheerful. Apart from our drama teacher, Ginger had without a doubt been everyone’s favourite. She lived alone in an apartment with her mother. We rarely went there as, looking back, it was not a place Ginger felt comfortable taking her friends to. Ginger was pretty, she was talented and she was smart. She was the star of the show, she was my hero and an absolute role model.

  After high school she headed off to the blue-chip confines of Yale University to be a doctor. Within a year she had changed her mind and gone back to studying drama. I think we all believed if there was success to be had in the group then Ginger would be the one to have it. If I am honest Ginger was probably, although not in a sexual way, my first love outside my family. Well, there was my kindergarten teacher, Miss MacDonald, when I was five but I don’t think I would recognise her today.

  Just because I was in town didn’t mean Ginger didn’t have a life to lead. Like many another struggling thespian she had found an alternative career in the restaurant business so I had a couple of days to kill before we could get together. You’d think Hollywood would be a Holy Grail for someone like me who has spent her professional life in the entertainment industry but I wasn’t sure. Everything about Hollywood sounds romantic. The very name Sunset Boulevard suggests a life shot through gauze and accompanied by swelling strings. Sadly, it isn’t like that at all and as for Hollywood Boulevard … well, if I’d come looking for glamour I would have sobbed aloud on the sidewalk.

  It is a filthy place, lined with large bronze stars which have been embedded in the sidewalk on both sides and for some distance. As I checked out the names, Superman and Crocodile Dundee sauntered past me followed by a small parade of young cheerleaders who in turn were shadowed by a man with scarves wrapped around his feet for shoes. It was impossible to tell who was in town for entertainment purposes and who was on the loose from some restraining authority. I kept my head down and followed the parade of granite stars. Their location was not always felicitous. I found Dean Martin outside Fore Play — a bondage wear shop; Otto Preminger outside a wig shop; Fatty Arbuckle, rather pleasingly, outside a deli; and the debonair Spencer Tracey beside a particularly evil-smelling fast food place. The sort of place you only think smells good if you are pissed. A magic shop offered me ‘Instant Pussy’ while Fredericks of Hollywood Lingerie beckoned me into the Museum of Underwear where you can stare at the underpants of the famous, the gussets of Mary Tyler Moore, Shirley MacLaine, Robert Redford and the like. Here you can stand and think about the information that Alfred Hitchcock had no belly button. Time, in fact, to contemplate someone else’s navel. Fame indeed.

  I did wonder what it would be like to stay in town as a big star. I had started out quite successfully in the Lux Hotel on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. The normal price of $325 per night had been slashed to $119 on-line. There are no shops in the ar
ea with anything that might sustain everyday life but it is fantastically convenient if you suddenly need a $3,000 handbag. I had rarely been so neatly placed to pop into Van Cleef & Arpels or Cartier. I had never been in those places in my life but I was neatly placed. Up and down the drive, shops were laid out like art galleries with individual handbags displayed like sculptures. Many down-lighters, much marble and stone shelving, but little anyone would actually want to purchase. Up the road, the entrance to Ralph Lauren was narrow and lined with many conifers. Indeed it was something of an arboreal fight to get in. I only went because they claimed to be having a sale but there were no price tags visible anywhere. I think one wasn’t supposed to look for the price and scrabbling around inside the garments to look for a ballpark figure was clearly frowned on by the staff. I wandered into the women’s section and immediately felt totally out of place. These were clothes for people who never intend to move very far or very fast. There was little cloth given over to covering the midriff and, unlike Mr Hitchcock, it is an area of my body I wish to draw a veil over.

  People, however, patently live near Rodeo Drive. If you wander just two minutes from credit card alley you find pinched women scooping dog mess into plastic bags and eyeing you with suspicion as they slip back into their apartments. These residents must buy milk and bread and indeed haemorrhoid preparations somewhere. All the same, it seemed like a veneer of life rather than life itself. A woman drove past in a vast smart car puffing on lip-liner as she steered. Half an eye on herself and half on the road. It is the modus operandi for Beverly Hills. Far from the treed acres of Seattle, the local property pages were offering a different league of real estate. How about 4.16 acres of land in Bel-Air for a mere $13,900,000? Here I could apparently ‘create my own world’. This suggested to me that even at that price the place wanted work. I decided against.

  I had only booked in for one night at the Lux as I had no idea what the hotel would be like. It had a strange boutique chic but it would do.

  ‘Do you have any rooms for tomorrow?’ I asked Christian, the somewhat camp man at reception who probably would have been happier talking about permanent eyelash tinting.

  He eyed my trainers and the rather tired BBC fleece I was wearing. ‘No,’ he said firmly.

  ‘Can you recommend anywhere?’ I asked.

  ‘At the price you paid?’ he sneered loud enough for a woman nonchalantly bouncing her platinum Amex card at the end of the counter to hear. Patently Christian could not. I was to depart. It’s funny how staff in expensive places sometimes become bigger snobs than their customers. I didn’t want to waste time searching for accommodation so I picked a place out of the Yellow Pages. My mistake was that I chose the Holiday Inn in Hollywood. These two place names sounded identical to my Armenian cab driver and neither he nor I had any idea where he was heading. In addition to being foreign my chauffeur, sadly, was also deaf. It’s a killer combination for a man whose living involves taking instruction. He had few words of English and the few he had he couldn’t hear. Frankly, I had been lucky to get a cab at all. This is not a city where anyone ever steps into a street to hail a cab. They all get into their own cars and I had made a mistake in not hiring one. I had thought long and hard about changing my career on this trip and I realised I had all the qualifications needed to become a cab driver in the city of angels.

  Arnold Armenia and I wandered about Los Angeles seeking anywhere that would take me in. We drove past an enormous eatery entirely made of tin, a diner made from a train carriage painted yellow and any number of other places, all of which looked like movie sets rather than actual venues. I realised that no restaurant on the strip had ever taken over an old building and thought, This is charming — it just needs a little work. They had bought a property and then torn it down and built a themed building which represented their chosen cuisine. It is an attitude the British don’t really understand.

  They say my great comic hero Lucille Ball haunts her old house in Hollywood. She loved it so much she continued to live there after her divorce from her husband Desi Arnaz. When she died in 1989 (I can’t bear it. It’s not that long ago and I could have met her), the new owners immediately set about what the Americans call ‘a complete remodelling’ which means the house was never the same again. Now she is said to wander the property disconsolately. I’m not surprised. Lucille Ball was a television and comedy pioneer, the very sort of person whose history this town needs to preserve. Where is its sense of the past?

  Los Angeles may be the land of dreams but they exist cheek by jowl with great poverty. Just that day the LA Times was running a story about evictions in the city being on the increase. They compared it to New York where more than 29,000 people now live on the streets, half of them children. It is not the American Dream of the movies. Outside my window we passed a parade of incomprehensible things. A ‘16-minute Smog Station’; IN and OUT Burgers, which I hoped referred to the drive-in facility they offered, rather than the quality of the food; We the People Legal Document Services, currently offering divorce for $189; Zone Perfect offering to keep you on your diet by delivering three meals and two snacks to you daily and Starbucks advertising a Banana Bran Muffin the size of one of Mae West’s breasts.

  Everywhere billboards advertised movies, stomach remedies and ‘gated communities’ such as Belmont Village Senior Living where pensioners could live in safety. I had only recently heard about the first lesbian one in New Mexico. It was hard to imagine. A whole community of sensibly dressed women who were good with power tools. All part of the endless specialisation of the world. Somewhere between Mae’s mammaries and the La Brea Tar Pits we got more lost and the cabbie had time to tell me about Armenia and how much he missed home because everyone he loved, his mother, his father and so on, was there. I was feeling quite tearful when at last the Holiday Inn hove into view. Soon I would know real pain.

  We had come a million miles from Beverly Hills. Here everything looked seedy and down at heel and no dog owner stooped to gather up doggie mess. We had gone from the land of haute couture to haute manure in a heartbeat. Next door to the depressing and less than pristine Holiday Inn the Hollywood Hills Beauty Center and Spa was offering a European spa pedicure with either paraffin wax or mud from the Dead Sea. I didn’t want to check into the hotel and stopped to look at this. Where would such a place get mud from the Dead Sea? A Dead Sea mud importer presumably. What an odd business to be in — mud importer. I wondered how it worked? Was it a large business or just a man with a bucket and spade and a large stock of watertight envelopes.

  In the lobby, all human life was there. A woman dressed neatly in a suit from a catalogue was talking to the porter about Canada.

  ‘I’ve been there,’ she said. ‘I started a church there.’ Words I would love to drop into conversation. ‘I’m a church planner,’ she explained.

  Church planner, LA cab driver, mud importer … there had to be something out there I could do. At reception the sort of woman I now know Maury favours on his chat show was standing, holding court. She was dressed somewhere between an ordinary member of the public and a hooker and was no doubt what the Americans call ‘white trailer trash’. It seems she had been flown in to appear on the real-life television court drama presided over by Judge Judy. Here members of the public air their disputes and allow Judge Judy to judge and make snide remarks as a side bar. The people at the desk seemed as reluctant as me to go through the checking-in charade so I had time to gather that the woman had lost her case. It seems she had been claiming $2,000 because a tyre had come off her car when it was being driven by a friend. I don’t know what the money was for — new tyres, damage to the car or possibly driving lessons.

  None of this was the Hollywood experience I had thought I would find. I fled from the hotel to seek the land of make-believe at Universal Studios up the road. As soon as you arrive at the studios a sign directs you to ‘Enjoy Yourself. You’re in Hollywood now’.

  Indeed, from the moment you are within earshot of the pl
ace until you leave there is never an instant when someone isn’t telling you what to do. I was very much out of season and the place was not busy. A red carpet buffered by giant Oscars leads to the main gates but I was nobody and was directed round the side. Here I pretty much had the sole attention of a smooth-looking grey-haired man who wandered about making many deep-voiced announcements on a hand-held mike. He looked as if he had stepped off the set of a soap opera where he had been busy giving his ‘older rake’ performance. I wondered if he was disappointed with his life or thrilled at living on the fringes of the big movie business.

  ‘If you need a map in another language —’ he began, ‘—then you probably won’t understand when I tell you where you can get it,’ I concluded out loud, but no one was listening. Everyone — announcer, ticket-seller and the three other tourists —was taking this very seriously. I was supposed to be in awe. The world’s largest studio and movie theme park advertises with the slogan ‘You can’t get any closer to the real Hollywood’. Which implies that you, you poor schmuck, are never going to be a star.

  A Pinkerton private security guard checked my plebeian bag of belongings. He wore a black straw Canadian Mountie style hat which is a difficult look for a thick-set man to carry off. The announcements continued against a backdrop of endless, exhausting, sweeping John Williams-type music on a loop. The music had an urgency that suggested we were all about to head off on a Luke Skywalker kind of adventure. Retail opportunities presented themselves the moment I entered the car park. I went to buy sunglasses because I was in Hollywood now. There was a gentleman from Russia ahead of me who had clearly been provided for my benefit as entertainment. He had the sort of cod accent which can only have been provided by central casting. I stood waiting to purchase my Thelma and Louise glasses while he went through the American coin system with a member of staff recently arrived from Guatemala.