Leaving Eden

by Anne Leclaire

  There were two things I planned on doing as soon as I got there, even before I got a job. One was for Mama and one was for me. First thing, for Mama I was going to find Natalie’s grave. When I found it, I was going to leave some flowers there, gardenias if I could find them, no matter what the cost. I knew that’s what Mama would have done if she’d been able to go there like she’d wanted. Before she ran out of time. Then, for myself, I was going to track down the Sasha woman. I was determined to discover who she was and exactly why my mama’d had her name written on a paper.

  For just a moment, when I got off the plane and was waiting to retrieve Mama’s gray suitcase, I came near to panicking. People were shoving and pushing and speaking in about three hundred languages and it was so crowded, you couldn’t imagine. It was enough to turn a person dizzy. Off to one side there were about two dozen men holding up signs with people’s names written on them, and if I could have wished for one thing at that moment, it would have been that there was someone there holding up a sign saying Tallie Brock, or at least someone telling me where I could find a bus that would take me straight to Hollywood. I located the baggage claim and waited for Mama’s gray suitcase to show up. I was just beginning to think maybe it had gotten lost somewhere along the way when it came riding by on the conveyor belt. I was reaching for it when this man wearing a white suit and baseball cap grabbed it up. I thought he was trying to steal it, but it turned out he was only trying to help. I thanked him, polite as can be, and he inquired whether I had someone meeting me or if I needed a ride. “My car is right outside and I’d be happy to give you a lift,” the smiling man said. I was thinking that people in L.A. were just as nice as people in Eden and was just about to accept his offer when this bossy girl butted in and told him to get lost. Before I had a chance to tell her to mind her own beeswax, the man disappeared, melted right into the crowd like he’d never been there at all.

  The bossy girl told me the man was as nice as he looked and was always trying to pick up girls who’d just arrived. She said I had virgin written all over me. I told her I didn’t care what she thought she saw written on me but one thing for sure was that I wasn’t any virgin. If I’d said something like that to Elizabeth Talmadge or anyone back at Eden they’d have fainted for sure, but not this girl. She laughed and said, “Not that kind.” She said I was an L.A. virgin. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “You’re here to be an actress.” I said I was, and next thing we were talking like old friends. She said everybody called her Jazz, but her name was Jasmine Jade, which I thought was perfect since it matched her eyes, which were an astonishing shade of green. (Later I learned she had colored contact lenses, and that her real name was Cynthia.) She said she was a professional dancer, and was presently employed at Jumbo’s Clown Room, but only temporarily. I told her my name was Taylor Skye. She asked if I had a place to stay, and the next thing I knew we were sitting in this VW Bug painted hot pink and heading for Hollywood. She was staying in a youth hostel. For the time being, she said. Until she got her big break. It was cheap and located right in the middle of the action, she said, and that suited me fine. I didn’t tell her that if she was looking for a big break she should think about wearing something besides combat boots and a baggy house-dress that looked like it belonged to Etta Bird.

  She drove the little Bug like a maniac, zipping in and out of traffic. Talking a blue streak the whole time. She said she’d been at the airport—LAX, she called it—to pick up a friend flying in from Denver, but the girl never showed up and she must have been there to meet me. I agreed. I knew Mama was directing things, and all I had to do was relax and go along. We passed a giant, round building that looked like a pile of long-playing records stacked one on top of the other. Jazz said it was the Capitol Records Building. For sure Elizabeth Talmadge had never seen anything like that. Then she pointed out the Griffith Observatory and asked if I recognized it. She was surprised I knew it was where they’d filmed the final fight scene in Rebel Without a Cause. I didn’t tell her I knew everything about Natalie Wood, since that was private between Mama and me, and even if I wanted to I couldn’t have gotten a word in sideways. Next she pointed out the famous Hollywood sign, the one the girl jumped off. She said the letters were fifty feet tall. It looked exactly like it did on Mama’s postcard. Then I saw a boy sitting under an umbrella right by the curb holding an orange sign that said Maps to 300 Movie Stars’ Homes. There were palm trees, and the sky was brown in the distance—smog, according to Jazz—and I might as well have landed on Mars. The hills were brown, too, and Jazz said they were always brown in the summer because they don’t get enough water. It made me wish I could show her the Blue Ridge, all green, like mountains should be.

  The hostel was located right on Hollywood Boulevard. It was quiet when we got there—everyone was working or asleep, but Jazz said I would meet them later. She said there was a party that night up in the hills. She said “industry” people would be there, and why didn’t I come along. Well, I almost fainted right on the spot. I hadn’t been in Hollywood one day and I was already going to a party. She said parties were important. “All you have to do is meet the right person and your career is set,” she said.

  First thing, she said, was that I had to get myself some clothes. She said I needed to fit in. People look at you and you’re either Us or Them, and the way I was dressed, I might as well be carrying a neon sign saying Them. This from a girl with no more fashion sense than Rula Wade. I thought if I was going to be taking advice from anyone about style, it wouldn’t be from someone wearing combat boots and a dress with ugly squiggles all over it.

  She said I should take myself over to Aardvark’s Used Clothes, but if I was too tired to get there she’d lend me something for that night. The next thing I knew she had me dressed in leopard-print tights and an oversized top and was ratting up my hair. I didn’t know if I looked like Us, but for sure I didn’t look like me.

  She said she was going to take a nap and we’d leave for the party around eight. Wesley’d pick us up, she said. He played lead guitar in a band called Electric Lash and knew the people having the party. Then she warned me not to go walking around by myself. She said it wasn’t always safe, especially after dark. She said things had been crazy since the Rodney King verdict and I nodded, like I knew who Rodney King was.

  They gave me a room with four other girls, not one of them overly neat, and I settled in. I thought about calling my daddy, just to let him know I was all right and not to worry, but then I figured it was night back in Eden and he was probably sitting at CC’s. Then I went down to the shower room that everyone shared and checked again to see if my moon had arrived.

  Tallie’s Book

  Faith doesn’t run steady like a river. It takes working at.

  Leaving isn’t as easy as you might imagine.

  twenty-two

  Well, the party was a gigantic disappointment. When Jazz said it was an “industry party,” I was expecting we’d be meeting some stars, even if they weren’t the big ones, but it turned out to be mostly people who worked on movie crews or played in some kind of band. There were a couple of set carpenters, a makeup man, a girl who worked for Craft Food Services, which is this catering business that goes to movie sets, and the dog walker for some star no one had ever heard of. The most important person there was a personal assistant to the personal assistant to the head prop man on Good Morning, Vietnam, and she acted slow-witted, though Jazz said it was because she was on drugs, and I said for sure she wasn’t going to be advancing anyone’s career including her own if she continued like that. Everyone there was drinking and smoking dope and wearing dark glasses, even at night. One boy in leather pants that Rula Wade would have killed for talked to me for about five seconds. Once he found out I had just arrived from Virginia, he lost interest. I spent most of my time sitting on a stone fence by the swimming pool hoping I didn’t still look like I was carrying a sign proclaiming Virgin.

  I got up early the next morning, but the other girls
in my room didn’t look like they’d be waking anytime before Christmas. I didn’t plan on wasting time waiting for Jazz to surface, so I got dressed and headed out. As I said, the hostel was located right on Hollywood Boulevard, directly across from the Chinese Theatre, where they held movie premieres and where the stars put their handprints in wet cement. Just looking over at the red and gold splendor of it made me smile. I wished Raylene could have seen it. I turned right and proceeded along the famous Walk of Fame. I went slow and read each person’s name spelled out in brass letters. There was a little brass picture in the middle of each star, too, indicating what the person was famous for. An old-fashioned movie camera for movie stars, a record for recording artists, a microphone for the radio people. Like that. One thing Mama hadn’t prepared me for was the length of the sidewalk, which went on for blocks and blocks. On both sides of the street. All the famous people you’d expect to see were there—John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe—but there were lots of people I’d never heard of and I was sure Mama hadn’t either. Like Warren Hull and someone named Julius LaRosa. Most disappointing were the stars for the cartoon characters and animals. Woody Woodpecker. Lassie. Not even real people.

  After a while, the sidewalk turned down another street named Vine, and I went down that, too. There was a man sitting on the sidewalk applying polish from a bottle to the brass parts of the stars and buffing away with a rag. I watched him for a while, and he told me his job was keeping the brass all shiny. He said when he finished the entire sidewalk, he went back to the beginning and started all over again. It took me almost an hour to cover the entire Walk of Fame. The blister developing from my new sandals slowed me down. I passed by tons of stores. It was possible to buy any tacky thing in the world you wanted on that street. There were T-shirt stores and guitar stores and shops with about eight hundred racks of postcards. I passed one place called “Exotic Shoes,” and that’s exactly what was in the window. Boots that reached near to your waist, and heels so high they could have been stilts—so that just walking in them a person would risk breaking her neck. There was a wig store that had about a hundred wigs in the window in every style and color imaginable. Pink and white and green and purple, along with the usual shades. Raylene would have flipped if she’d seen them. I wished she could have been there, then I thought that it seemed that ever since I arrived in L.A. I’d spent half my time thinking about people in Eden, the very town I’d been hell-bent on escaping.

  I stopped at a newsstand to buy a paper called Variety ’cause Jazz said that’d be the place to look for job ads. While I was reading the paper, I got myself a cup of coffee and thought about Mama doing the exact same thing when she landed in L.A. I found an opening for a receptionist at Warner Brothers Studios, and another for a job in the mailroom at Paramount, so I borrowed a pen from the waitress and circled these as well as a few others that looked possible until something more promising came along. Jazz said if I had any sense of rhythm in me I could probably be a dancer at Jumbo’s Clown Room, but when she’d driven me by there, I saw all these flashing signs that said Nude Dancers, so that was out.

  After I finished my coffee I stopped by a drugstore to pick up some Band-Aids for my blister, which was practically bleeding, then I headed back toward the Chinese Theatre. Just as I got there a bus pulled up and all these tourists climbed out and right off started getting down on their knees and putting their own hands in the prints left by the stars, like they thought maybe some of the fame would wipe off on them. Every single one of them was taking pictures. I remembered what Jazz had said about acting like “you were one of us and not one of them,” and was glad I hadn’t brought Mama’s old Kodak.

  The place with Roy Rogers’s name had an imprint of his horse’s shoe, too, and an outline of a revolver. Naturally this turned my mind to Spy. That made my chest ache, not the burning kind of hurt that came when I thought of Mama, more a wanting ache, and I got to wondering if he was missing me at all and if his high-powered lawyers were being successful in keeping him out of jail. I sure hoped so. To get my mind off Spy, I walked around a bit more and found Shirley Temple’s handprint. She’d been barefoot when she placed her foot in the cement, and her feet were tiny as a doll’s. A star named Margaret O’Brien had been barefoot, too, and Judy Garland’s foot was about the size of a midget’s. At last I found the place where Natalie had signed. Then two women came over and asked me if I’d mind taking a snapshot of them standing by the theater.

  “Imagine,” one said. “We’re standing exactly where all these famous actors have stood. Exactly in the same spot.”

  I thought about all the people traveling to this very place, who came from all over the country, all over the world, all coming to be in the movies or get close to those who were stars, like it was a kind of magic, the same kind of magic that made everyone in Eden sign up for Glamour Day at the Kurl. I thought about Mama and me and Jazz, and thousands of others, all of us wanting to be famous, no matter what it took or who you had to leave behind, even if they were people who truly loved you. Mama never told me that dreams had their own price and you had to be willing to pay the cost, but they did. Then, standing right there, for the first time I could remember, I found myself getting mad at Mama. It wasn’t right for a mama to be leaving her girl behind just so she could go off chasing some dream. It wasn’t right to mow down anything that stood in your way, especially if it was the folks who loved you. If Mama had been there, I would have told her she’d had responsibilities and I would have told her how it felt to be left behind, and nothing she could have said would have charmed me out of my anger. I was working up a righteous head of steam, and no telling how long I’d have been fuming, when suddenly I remembered the things I’d done. Stealing Martha Lee’s money without a second thought, running off without a good-bye to Raylene or Spy or my daddy. I wasn’t any better than Mama and for sure was as pigheaded in pursuit of the mesmerizing dream of Hollywood. After that, my anger settled down, not because Mama’d charmed me, but because I’d reached an understanding about the power of a dream and how it could turn a person’s head backwards. I wondered if it was possible to work toward a dream without hurting people along the way.

  Then, standing right there in front of the famous Chinese Theatre, I had myself a revelation. Etta Bird used to say a revelation could about knock the air straight out of a person’s body, and that’s exactly how I felt. It took me a minute or two to get to breathing normal. The revelation didn’t come in any big flash of light or from voices like Etta said could happen. It was quiet and came from a deep and true place inside. It told me that as sure as dogwood bloomed in the Blue Ridge in spring, I didn’t want to be a movie star. Not really. Standing there looking at the handprints of big stars and listening to the women talking foolish, I knew I’d taken money from my mama’s best friend and traveled across the whole country, all the time in pursuit of a dream that wasn’t even mine. Becoming a star was my mama’s dream and somewhere along the road, I’d taken it as my own.

  Learning this made me feel empty. I’d been planning on this for so long, it felt like I’d lost something big, and that I’d let Mama down, too. But then I felt Mama next to me and I heard her voice clear, just like I’d been doing for the past several days. She told me it was all right. She said I wasn’t disappointing her in the least. She said a person’s job in life was to find and follow her own dream, and it was time for me to be discovering mine. That made me feel strong enough to get up and head back to the hostel. It looked like I would be using the rest of Martha Lee’s money getting back to Eden, and I sure had a mess waiting for me to clean up when I got there. I figured I could get a ticket home in the next day or two and that would leave me time to finish up my other business.

  I decided the first thing I’d do would be to find Natalie’s grave. I asked a lady selling maps at the corner and she said she thought Natalie was buried in the cemetery over by Paramount, although she wasn’t sure. When I got back to the hostel, Jazz was awake and said she’d drive me.r />
  Paramount Pictures was in a part of Hollywood comprised mostly of car wash and body shop places, and the entire studio was bigger than all of downtown Eden, and that is the gospel truth. A fence enclosed it, and on one corner there was this giant globe attached to the roof. There were big arched gates with black metal scrollwork, and you had to have a pass to get inside. I told Jazz my Mama’d worked there, but I could tell she didn’t believe me. She pointed out a restaurant called Lucy’s El Adobe and said a lot of people from the studio ate there, so I told her about Mama having lunch with Kelly McGillis, but she didn’t seem to believe that either.

  We found the cemetery on the street backing up to Paramount. Jazz drove right in, and I have to say I thought it was the prettiest cemetery I’d ever seen. There were big stones containing actual pictures of the person who was buried there. We asked the lady in the gift shop where Natalie Wood’s grave was. She said there were lots of movie stars there, like Jayne Mansfield and Peter Lorre and Rudolph Valentino, nearly every important dead person in Hollywood, she said, but not Natalie Wood. She told us she thought Natalie was buried over at the Forest Lawn cemetery, which was across town, by the Warner Brothers Studios, the other place for famous people. Before we left, we took a little drive around the place. We saw Mel Blanc’s grave, and his stone said, That’s All Folks, ’cause he was famous for being the cartoon voice of Bugs Bunny. On some stones the engravings weren’t even in English. Jazz said they were in the Cyrillic alphabet. Douglas Fairbanks’s stone was off by itself at the foot of a long, narrow pool. Lots of people had carved their initials in a tree located nearby just to prove they’d been there, and that reminded me of the tourists putting their hands in the cement prints at the Chinese Theatre.

  After we left that cemetery, Jazz said she was starving. We went to a Chinese place for lunch. Then she wanted to go clothes shopping, and it was late afternoon before we finally got over to Forest Lawn, which was more like a big park than a cemetery, with statues of people like George Washington. You might not believe this, but there was a wedding going on when we got there. With a tent and everything. Imagine. People actually got married there. Raylene wouldn’t have believed it either. I could just hear her saying that only in Hollywood would people want to get married in a cemetery. The man at the gate made us stop and he gave us a list of printed regulations. There were rules for everything, like how long flowers were allowed to stay on the graves—five days—and no pets and no picnics on the grounds, which seemed peculiar to me. Why could you have a wedding and not a picnic? Jazz told him we were looking for Natalie Wood’s grave, and he checked in a book he had and told us she wasn’t there. Jazz asked if he knew where she was and he said he thought she was over at the cemetery by Paramount.