‘Dis is ten cents?’ boomed the Russian.
‘Let me look,’ replied the Guatemalan who also turned out to be myopic. They went through every coin in the realm. All life was there.
At last, my eyes concealed behind black plastic, I stood on a great walkway in the heart of the park and looked out over the Hollywood hills. In the distance I could see what looked like the Warner Brothers studios. They had once threatened to sue Groucho Marx for using the word ‘Casablanca’ in a film title and he had threatened to counter-sue over their use of the word ‘brothers’. There was acres of space and hours of sunlight. Movie-making heaven. I decided to start with the tour on a trolley. The assault on my senses got worse.
I can only assume that no one connected with the park has ever stood in the queue for the tour or they would be checking into the Betty Ford Clinic in a breath. To combat the danger of anyone getting bored the queuing area is lined with displays of stills from famous movies, while at least four different soundtracks can be heard simultaneously. It was an astonishing barrage of babble. No visitor was allowed to stop and think independently for a minute. I’m afraid I did think if a Muslim extremist turned up at Universal they would probably decide they had been right about America. It was an exhausting place of excess.
A still from Schindler’s List reminded me of my great friend the writer Alan Coren and how he loved to point out each time we got in the lift at work that it had been made by the Schindler company and was therefore Schindler’s lift. I stood and stared at the images of the movie stars. I suppose I should long to be enshrined on the displays of such a place but I didn’t. On a board of Leading Ladies there was a picture of a woman I had been at university with. We had been close in those days and when I had run into her years later, I had been delighted. She had unexpectedly treated me with a strange and deliberate distancing. A coolness which suggested I wanted something from her. It was horrible and hurtful but she was a very big star now and she had got used to a different kind of behaviour. I have seen it before and I don’t know who fame makes more of a mess of — the people who don’t have it or the people who do.
The tour set off down Bob Marley Avenue. I realised that, along with Muhammad Ali, there were a whole host of people I don’t associate with being captured on celluloid whom Hollywood claims as its own. Larry ‘I’ll be your guide’ had patently done the tour before. He had learned his patter and, by gum, he was going to steam us through it if it killed him. We galloped through the fact of Universal City having its own mayor, fire station and post office and the exciting news that they were currently shooting the prequel to Silence of the Lambs with Anthony Hopkins.
I won’t spoil the tour in case you decide to go. I thought it was worth it. We met King Kong, experienced an earthquake in a tube station, where a truck fell through the road above and would have crushed us if it weren’t for that fire which would have annihilated us if it weren’t for that flood …
Having Jaws come at you on Amity Island was okay but I did nearly shit myself with the scarab beetles on the Mummy set. The main thing was how busy it all was. The studio is a working place and everywhere people were building, painting, preparing for some new extravaganza. The thing that grabbed my attention were the bungalows on the lot where writers under contract sit and churn out ideas. People living by their imagination, the very thing that had failed to happen on 9/11. Some of the greatest writers have sat in there: Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and scores of others. Being looked after so they could sit and think and create. We have nothing like it in the UK and I was overwhelmed with jealousy. Now that I would like. That I would like a lot. Not that the studios truly appreciate the writer. The tour had begun with a small video clip that posed the question, ‘How do movies begin?’ and had answered it by showing a producer behind his desk saying they began there. Of course they don’t. They begin in someone’s head, in the bath, shopping or walking in the garden. I don’t mind if no one recognises that. I just would love to be looked after to enable me to write. I thought of my great-aunt Signe and her financial supporters. I have a million ideas for books and movies but endlessly find myself at some corporate event for drainage engineers or whatever in order to make a living. Interesting to reach a stage in life when you realise that all you want is to be patronised.
I went to have a meal at one of the many fast food outlets. On the way announcements warned me not to sit on the escalator (a thought which had never crossed my mind), to hold on to the hand rail, to be careful — to be endlessly instructed in what I might or might not do, presumably so that I wouldn’t end up in court before Judge Judy. At the food counter my meal options quite literally dripped with grease. A family so fat that three of them were sitting at a table for eight, were silently eating under a barrage of music and instructions. I realised that it is not anthrax that will kill the nation but cholesterol. Perhaps the Taliban have actually gone into catering.
Not knowing which hotel I would end up in I had arranged to meet Ginger back at the Lux Hotel on Rodeo Drive. As I stood in the street waiting, a tanned woman in hot pants went past on the amorous arm of an extremely old man. How odd for a woman to be satisfied with a dissatisfying life if someone bought her clothes and jewellery. A young woman with long brown hair drove past on the other side of the road in a black Mercedes. I thought it was Ginger. I knew she had got divorced and had remarried. Maybe she had some older man who now spoiled her and cared for her and maybe that wasn’t so bad after all. I was in fantasy land when a small, Japanese car which would have failed its MOT test in the UK pulled up and Ginger got out. She looked the same, smiled the same and hugged me the same, but her long, brown hair was now long and completely grey. I realised I had been looking for someone from thirty years ago.
‘Sandra! I’d know you anywhere,’ she beamed.
Sandra? I don’t know if I’d know me anywhere.
I got in and we headed for her home. She kicked off her shoes and drove in bare feet. It was something I remembered she had always done. I looked at her feet and for a moment nothing had changed. It is the minutiae of the past which will suddenly send us back. We drove north through the deep canyons of Los Angeles where even modern technology cannot provide a decent signal for a mobile phone. The sun was setting and it was beautiful. Ginger was chatting and she too was still beautiful. A filing cabinet rattled in the back of the car.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve been helping a friend.’ Of course she had. She was always helping out. Over the years her voice had deepened. It no longer held that girlish uncertainty.
Ginger and her husband Eric live in a small suburb of LA called Sherman Oaks. Here they rent a cramped upstairs apartment with a lovely quiet courtyard below. I was excited to meet Eric. Ginger had told me he was a screenwriter. Perhaps one of those very people I had idealised, living in a protected bungalow. Eric, as it happened, wasn’t excited to meet me. The apartment consisted of several small rooms none of which was designed for more than two people. In their sitting room there was one comfortable armchair, a chair for a person with chronic back trouble, and a television the size of a small seaside cinema. Squeezed in a corner was a bicycling machine and a mat for sit-ups. Whatever else Eric and Ginger did, they did not sit together to watch TV.
Eric was younger than Ginger and immensely thin with large glasses. Eric did not want to share tips about screenwriting techniques or even software. He had had a bad day. He had been over to see a friend to watch the game and the friend had gone for a massage in the middle and it had all gone wrong. Ginger brought in a chair from their computer so I could sit down.
‘I don’t think we’ve ever done this.’ She giggled as Eric, with his bad back, watched her move the furniture. Entertaining was clearly not a priority pastime. Ginger showed me an alumni book for the high school where I was listed along with the address I had only recently moved from. I could only think Sue must have put it in. How strange. I was an alumna of an American high school. I had never felt more distant
from a thought in my life. I met Ginger’s cat who was very old and about as pleased at having company as Eric was. Eric, who wants to write action movies, had had enough actual conversation and decided he wanted to go out.
‘Where shall we eat?’ asked Ginger. Patently neither one of them cooked. They were both rake thin. Still, not cooking was what all the Gladyses did. Apart from Regina everyone else either went out or got their mother to do it.
Eric laughed. ‘You can take Sandra anywhere. She’ll be glad to eat anything. She’s from England. They don’t have anything worth eating.’
Union Jack bunting fluttered out in my head as mentally I rushed to the barricades to defend English cuisine. It was not a battle position I had ever imagined I would take up.
‘Have you been to England?’ I asked. Eric nodded. It seems when he is not writing he earns a living selling film rights. This work had taken him to Europe, which was a shame as there appeared to be nothing about the place that he liked. Venice smelled and, at a pinch, you could ‘eat that Plough Mans’ in England. That was just about okay. I tried to think of the last time I’d had a ploughman’s. Our local pub does Thai food. Eric went to the movies, presumably to see something with no words in it, and Ginger and I walked out into downtown Sherman Oaks. The town was full of dining possibilities. It was wall-to-wall neon signs offering fast foods. Clearly the idea that it might sometimes be good for food preparation to take time was alien. We stopped in at a diner called Solleys. Here Clyde was pleased to serve us. He handed out menus which were much too big to deal with and then proceeded to give us a verbal list of specials. Ginger offered to order something we could share. I was delighted, partly because I didn’t have to wade through the choices and partly because, not that I would tell Eric this, I knew that no matter what I ordered it would taste the same. Ginger is a vegetarian now A non-smoking, non-drinking, non-acting vegetarian.
I had been so sure that of all the twelve theatrical Gladyses Ginger would never give up the cause of theatre, that she would be fighting to the bitter end for fame and fortune. It had been in her blood. She told me her grandfather had been in show business. It seems he was quite the dandy and wore spats when he did his act on the Jewish theatre circuit. All this was news to me. I didn’t even know Ginger was Jewish but then she wasn’t really Jewish because her mother was Italian Catholic and everyone knows that the Jewish thing passes through the mother and Steve Immerman’s mother …
I asked her about the quote in the yearbook and she said she had felt defensive about crying all the time when she was growing up. I don’t remember her crying once. Same past, different picture. I caught up on her life. How her mother had died of a brain tumour. How she had struggled to find acting work in LA and then met her first husband John. After both trying to make a go of show business they had moved to his small hometown in Wyoming. Here they had been ‘Mr and Mrs Theater’ to the town where he worked in real estate and she taught aerobics. Then he had wanted to come back to the big city and soon it had all fallen apart. How she had to help get her sister deprogrammed from some cult.
‘I found a deprogrammer in San Francisco,’ she explained and I longed to ask what section in the phone book you look under for that.
Now her sister lives near by on disability. Ginger works in a smart restaurant in Beverly Hills and spends her free time studying to be a marriage and family therapist.
‘What about the acting?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I don’t do that any more.’ She shrugged and smiled.
It was incomprehensible. Of course she did that. That was what Ginger did, but apparently not. At forty-seven, she told me, the only singing she does is in the car. She was always the sympathetic one and felt she had a natural talent for therapy. Already it supplements her income.
‘Some friends of mine said they get more out of talking to me than to their therapists. Could they pay me?’
And I think that is what has happened to the world. We grow up and move away from our homes and in the end need to pay people to listen to us.
I had a small album with about a dozen pictures of my children. Ginger had an album of her cat. She showed me the cat on the sofa, cat on the bed, cat in a hat … She had never had children and never wanted to. It was not what I would have predicted for either of us. She was lovely, she was kind, but I was a grown-up now and everything was different.
Back at the flat Eric had returned from his movie. I still wanted to know about his screenwriting or at least his ambitions for writing. Over dinner I had learned that he has not had the success he wished for and it has been hard. I was keen to talk about the whole film-making process but Eric was not.
‘There is no European film industry,’ he said after I fired an opening gambit. I wondered if Harry Potter and its English writer were also dismissed but I got no chance for debate.
‘You two will want to talk, so I’ll watch TV,’ he announced and clamped on headphones like leather Mickey Mouse ears. On a nearby shelf sat a book entitled Writing Screenplays That Sell.
‘I had a crack at screenwriting,’ said Ginger, ‘but it’s hard. You know, the woman who wrote ET never wrote anything again.’ I didn’t know that but I bet she at least had some conversation.
Eric sat watching sport, which unfolded silently on the large screen. It was almost impossible to associate my old friend, who interacted so well, with a man wearing headphones watching TV. How curious to be a writer who seemed so uncurious about someone who had travelled thousands of miles to visit, who also wanted to write and who lived in a place he had been to. Eric’s writing friends who had succeeded had done so with scripts for series like Star Trek. Perhaps they don’t require interaction. A hockey puck flew across the screen. Perhaps he lived in a world of action. Maybe but I was disappointed.
‘I’m eight years older than Eric,’ Ginger explained. I decided that with a woman’s maturity and everything that adds up to about twenty years. I didn’t know if I could wait for Eric to grow up. We arranged to meet again but it was complicated. Ginger’s life was busy and although she was pleased to see me I was no longer a part of it. When I looked at her as we said goodbye I realised more ghosts had been laid to rest. Ginger said she had finally ‘found her niche in life’ and I believed her. It wasn’t what I had imagined but she would make a good therapist. Everyone would want to unburden to her. Everyone, of course, except Eric.
On my last day I did what I should have done at the beginning and hired a car. I drove out to the coast and here, at last, I got my brush with fame. On Santa Monica pier, sticking out over the rolling waves of the Pacific, faded metal signs declared ‘No overhead casting’. This was rather appropriate as a film unit were busy on the pier casting extras to ride the frankly rickety-looking roller-coaster above my head. A large crowd of diverse folk had gathered in front of an officious woman with a clipboard. The director’s chair had the single word ‘Angel’ stencilled on the back which I took to be the name of the programme and not a comment on his demeanour. The gathering of lights, cameras and other technical equipment was much bigger than any UK TV show I had ever seen, but one of the main security guards explained it was a production of the television show Angel which I had never heard of.
‘Background people, let’s go!’ called Mrs Clipboard. A woman next to me grabbed a pushchair containing a baby doll which seemed to be in urgent need of medical attention. If poorly plastic could get a part then surely I could. For a moment everything went deathly quiet. Suddenly someone called ‘action’ and the place roared into life. Above and around me all the rides took off as the extras pretended to have a good time by squealing. Near me a woman took off her sweater. to reveal a bikini top and began to walk across the pier, swinging her hips. I wandered casually after her. I don’t know what the plot was but in years to come I believe Angel aficionados may read something into the enigmatic English woman on the pier.
Confident that I had given my all, I moved on down the pier. I have always loved these seaside structures. The
worn wide planks stretching over the sea are the same the world over as indeed are the fishermen. They stood in tight little groups, all men, all set up for the day, some solitary, some chatting, some playing cards. Here they were all Spanish. Gulls squawked overhead. The sound is the same on any pier, anywhere. They say that whales in different oceans have different accents. I couldn’t hear it with the gulls myself.
On the beach a man was digging a hole almost as deep as he was tall. He wore ill-fitting orange boxer shorts and nothing else. All morning the weather reports had kept threatening rain but it was just a bit cloudy. Many women wearing very little passed me by, running their hearts out.
At the end of the pier there was a board with a rather curious history of the world. I had the place to myself as no one else was that interested. The lay-out of the history gave pause for thought.
1907 Picasso paints Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
Financial panic hits the US.
I was sure the two incidents were not related just as I was sure Michael Jordan was not a franchise. It had been the same year that surfing had come to California from Hawaii. Then in 1911 someone had learned that faults in the earth caused earthquakes and in 1943 smog had been named. It took a while for me to get on to things I could actually remember. The 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, which I had watched from inside Mission Control in Houston; Woodstock; Kent State; US troops invading Cambodia; Watergate; Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinated; the My Lai massacre occurring while the US watched Laugh-In on TV … world events which I had been hyper aware of.
I walked back. Angel was saving the world and the man on the beach was still digging but now two large phallic shapes stuck straight up from the top of his sand pile. It bespoke hidden issues’ in his life and I wondered if I should give him Ginger’s number.
Gladys Reunited Page 30
