Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall

by Will Self

  ‘No, I don’t think so – I mean, not that I’ve done it yet, I’ll find out this evening.’

  ‘And the genre of the piece?’

  ‘Genre?’

  ‘Yes – I think film noir is difficult to resist, yet ... ‘

  ‘Should be?’

  ‘Absolutely, I’d go for almost anything else, rom-com, frat boy or screwball comedy – horror, perhaps. Just don’t do anything arty or obscure, there’s a good chap, remember the Kunstschadenfreude – remember me, when you find yourself in a chain hotel room, staring fixedly at the bulbous prongs of a video-games controller, and wondering where it all went wrong.’

  I squeezed out through the half-open door, then squeezed halfway back in again to wiggle my fingers, ‘Ta-ra.’

  ‘Ta-ra,’ Welles replied – he was fiddling with the Riddle tiles again.

  I had never found Busner in the least bit pitiable before – this was Welles’s genius entirely.

  * I cannot recall tasting pre-minted lamb until the early 2000s, when Sainsbury’s began to offer it among their selection of barbecue meats. This was over twenty years after the events described, so the phrase ‘minted lamb’ is interjected here to convey the implausibility of this reconstructive memoir, and indeed of the genre as a whole.

  *The majority of Busner’s papers appeared initially in the British Journal of Ephemera, and have been subsequently collected in The Undivided Self: Existential Torpor and Schizothymia (Poshlost Press, 2007).

  2

  KerPlunk!

  Hal, still fiercely red of lens, although now too old and hackneyed to be able to pick up much save for swivel-on bit parts – such as security cameras – gazed down on me from the corner of the Foyles travel section. I had spread out so many maps – checking for pliability, legibility, extent and area covered – that my miniature lebensraum was interfering with the shoppers. A bookseller came over to me; he was tall, raw-boned and wearing a T-shirt printed with the poster for Godard’s Breathless. His blue-black hair was cropped close at the sides of his slab head, and if he’d been better-looking the young Daniel Day-Lewis might have been playing him- or perhaps Lewis, a slave to the uglifying method, was playing him?

  ‘I’m sorry ...’ he said, ‘but people are complaining.’

  I told him what I was looking for and how difficult it was proving.

  ‘There’s a street map that Rand McNally do,’ he explained. ‘It covers the entire LA basin, if it’s not on display we might have one out back – I’ll go and look.’

  While Day-Lewis was gone I tidied up the other Los Angeleses, then upon his return we spread this new one out on top of a plan chest. It would do – it showed every street, although so small I had difficulty reading the names, even with glasses; it was also a single, easily folded sheet. However, it stopped at the Hollywood Hills, so there and then I scotched the next leg of my provisional plan, which had been to leave Hollywood via the cervical ‘O’ on the Hollywood sign, sleep newborn in the sierra, then slither on, via Universal City, down into the Valley, where I might be taken on as a porn star, or a third husband.

  Of course, the bookseller wasn’t only a bookseller – they seldom are. I wasn’t about to tell him the reason for my trip, although I did say something about walking and how antithetical it was to film, which gave him his opening: ‘Actually, I’m doing my doctoral thesis on slow motion—’

  I stifled a sarcastic yelp: nothing could’ve been more antithetical to slow motion that the coiled power of this thespian cat-bear who leant, his coccyx stabbed by the corner of the plan chest. ‘I see,’ I said, ‘you mean Muybridge’s photographs, the variable speeds of old-fashioned hand-cranked projectors, Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho,* that kinda thing?’

  ‘Well’ – his eyes were beautiful, his tone contemptuous ‘none of your examples are slow motion properly understood. Slow motion can only exist relative to full motion, and full motion itself has to be defined by a further correlate – say, a soundtrack. The Gordon piece – which I’m familiar with – is an example of extended play.’

  Hal screwed me out from the corner, the other bookstore browsers free-floated among the shelves, their minds revving up to choose – then stalling. I remembered lurking beside a wall at the Hayward Gallery as Norman Bates’s knife deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeescended. I barely looked at it, so absorbed was I by the grain, rough against my cheek – it was an effect I knew had been achieved by pressing planks into concrete before it set. Might it be possible to date the building by counting the rings in its walls? And what of my own predicament: my mind, frozen in my body, which, cells apoptosizing, careered towards entropy? As for this punk, I paid him for his map, but – I hoped, pointedly – neglected to thank him. It was Hal I waved goodbye to.

  There was one further errand to do before I could head home to pack. I left Foyles and walked up Tottenham Court Road to the Scientology Centre by Goodge Street tube. I had been dropping in at the centre for years and must have completed hundreds of their questionnaires. The so-called Standard Oxford Capacity Analysis was a simplistic personality test devised by L. Ron Hubbard himself, and I’d always scored well on it: I was unstable, depressed, anxious, sluggish, inhibited, feckless, compliant and antagonistic. The test confirmed that on those rare occasions that I found myself in groups (for the most part I was chronically withdrawn), it was impossible for me to successfully integrate. You would’ve thought that such corrosive traits, especially when combined with a sheep-like suggestibility, made me a perfect recruit – but the Scientologists stubbornly refused to let me join.

  In the late 1980s I had managed to inveigle myself on to an introductory weekend course at their British headquarters, Saint Hill Manor, near East Grinstead. This cultists’ house party was everything I could’ve hoped for, from the diluted orange juice concentrate to the strip-lit repression of the single-sex dorms. I thought I was doing well: I joined in the discussions enthusiastically, and whenever we had a free moment I devoured the master’s works in an exhibitionistic fashion.

  All went well until the Sunday morning, when, as a special treat we wannabes were given a test audit. The auditing procedure is the ritual that lies at the core of Dianetics; it’s nothing more than an extended lie-detector test, during which you’re wired up to a polygraph and asked a series of questions that range from the innocuous – ‘What is your favourite colour?’ – to the revealing – ‘Have you ever been sexually attracted to a member of the same sex?’ As long as you answer them truthfully you are awarded a ‘clear’, and your so-called ‘negative engrams’ are held to have been pulverized by the power of probity. In due course you ascend to the next level.

  Except that I never got to the first one. It didn’t help that the auditor – his hair an extravagant bouffant – was played by the Who front man Roger Daltrey (who, following the success of Tommy, and the biopic of John McVicar in which he played the lead role, was trying to consolidate his acting career). Nor did it help that I was attracted to members of my own sex – albeit not Daltrey. The needles jerked on the meter, the pens danced on the graph paper readout, my auditor announced that I was exhibiting deep resistance. I was in a cleft stick: to admit to any homosexual inclinations would have ruled me out entirely, for the Church of Scientology was as bigoted in this regard as any fundamentalist sect.

  Although sent packing from Saint Hill, I was still not to be deterred and over the coming years I went on pitching up at Tottenham Court Road, in disguises and under assumed names, armed with strategies for ‘fooling’ the Capacity Analysis.
It was all to no avail: the smiling Scientologists would let me take the test again, then send me on my way, with the advice that I see a doctor, a therapist, a priest – do anything, in short, but submit myself to their own mind control.

  The curious thing was that although at the outset I couldn’t have rightly said why it was that I so craved Scientology, as the years went by and my capacity to suspend disbelief in narrative was increasingly hobbled, I realized that my intuition had been sound: Hubbard’s opportunistic syncretizing of Astounding Stories, the Bhagavad Gita and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life was the perfect refuge for someone like me, who found the probable impossible, and the impossible highly likely.

  Besides, the Scientologists’ bizarre belief that their human bodies were only the temporary housing for immortal alien super-beings tallied with my own experience of life, in which well-established actors played even the walk-on parts – William Holden, long dead, adjusts his fedora by the ticket machine, then strolls on. The very condition of the actor, who assumes many different forms while remaining essentially himself, was like that of these Thetans – so was it any surprise that Hollywood stars, their frail psyches sprayed with incontinent regard, were also attracted to the cult?

  Hubbard, whose entire life was the front-projection of a successful sociopath, naturally wanted to direct. And ended up bushed in Southern California, presiding over his own sci-fi epics with woeful results, the silvery squeezy bottle passes through the meteorite shower in the shower stall. The perplexing thing was that during the hundred-year hegemony of the movie everything had been filmed – including films themselves. Actors had played historical personages, and those personages had also played themselves, while the actors that had played them appeared in other movies – playing themselves. This poly-dimensional cat’s cradle of references had snared plenty of people with reality-testing abilities far better than my own, and I maintained a certain amused tolerance for the way I lost myself in fugal ruminations such as this:

  Stanley Kubrick had used his own Hertfordshire estate as a location for his last movie, Eyes Wide Shut, starring the Scientologist Tom Cruise. In the film, London streets acted the part of Manhattan streets – a metempsychosis analogous to that of actors: the same place living through multiple locations. Kubrick was scared of flying – the young Hubbard pretended to be a fearless flyboy. Hubbard also claimed to have met Freud, who in turn had certainly known Schnitzler, whose Traumnovelle was the basis of Kubrick’s screenplay. And then ... Kubrick was rumoured to have employed a special coach in order to invest Cruise and his then wife Nicole Kidman’s sex scenes with the barest plausibility – which brings me back to Saint Hill and Roger Daltrey.

  You can, no doubt, see which way my mind was pelting ... The completed paper ran to some forty single-spaced pages, the dense type studded with emoticons and interwoven with diagrams bearing labels such as ‘45 degrees where the sigmoidal flexure of TC’s penis is greater than 9.7’. I left it at the Scientology Centre, the pink plastic wallet also containing an explanatory note: ‘I will be staying at the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard on the twelfth of June, should anyone from the International Dianetics College wish to discuss the enclosed with a view to preventing publication’, signed with the nom de guerre Will Smith.

  I kept stopping on the way back from Stockwell tube to take photographs. The bases of the limes along Binfield Road were spiky with withies among which nestled the cigarette packets and energy drink cans let fall by the multitudes that tramped by every day. The buses were nose to tail, snorting for admission to their ferroconcrete stockade. I took maybe two or three hundred shots of these lime shrines before the dusk tumbled from the rooftops into the street and night swarmed over the police crime tape looped between the lamp-posts at the junction of our road.

  Several of my neighbours were gathered at the cordon. One remonstrated with the officer on duty: ‘My son is disabled! He’s only fourteen years old – you can’t stop me from going home, he needs me!’

  All eyes were on the confrontation: the officer in her stab-proof waistcoat, the citizen in his dudgeon, so I ducked under the tape and moved swiftly past the technicians in their white crinkled boiler suits, who were picking at the congealed blood in the roadway. More techies were at work on the set opposite my front door: a neighbour’s Audi estate completely dusted with fingerprinting powder – under the Kliegs it looked like a whale baby coated in vernix. As I put my key in the lock the techies turned their snout masks towards me and grunt-queried; I answered by waving my library card officially, then disappeared inside.

  It was a Saturday night and as usual my wife had her cronies over to play games. We lived effectively separate lives; while I wrote screenplays that would never be made, she indulged in a rich fantasy life, one in which she was always about to start shooting – the very next day! An epic! She was Helen of Troy! Mary Magdalene! Joan of Arc! It was a sure-fire smash, with an astronomical budget! So, while I clickety-clacked away in my attic room, she swansoned from chamber to chamber, trying on outfit after outfit, then discarding them for the maids to tidy away.

  Except that we didn’t have any maids – a verism that made a mockery of her pretensions; instead it was our children – who had the precocious maturity associated with such neglect, and who were portrayed by a rota of superannuated child actors, gawky Macaulay Culkin, wizened Mickey Rooney, ambassadorial Shirley Temple, etc. – who did the tidying up around the gloomy Victorian house. They also did the cleaning, the laundry and the cooking – they even paid the bills and put themselves to bed punctually at eight-thirty. I’ve no idea how they found the time to go to school.

  I threw a few things into a bag ready for my departure on the morrow, then went to say goodnight to my wife. At forty-eight she was still a remarkably handsome woman, and if she had been content to age gracefully I think everything might have been all right between us. As it was, I found her playing KerPlunk with her tame fags, all of them dolled up like teenagers – she in a pink velour tracksuit, her dyed-blonde hair in madly streaked bunches, the others in saggy-assed jeans that exposed the waistbands of their underpants so their pot bellies were captioned ‘Calvin Klein’.

  As I came into the kitchen my wife drawled, ‘Get me a drink, darling.’ And one of the forty-somethings leapt to do her bidding. ‘Make it frothier this time’ – she waved her heart-shaped lollipop like a lorgnette – ‘and I want more marshmallows!

  ‘Oh,’ she deigned to notice me. ‘It’s you – don’t hover like that, pull up a chair and join us.’

  Reluctantly I did as she bade me, and Frankie or Hud (I could never tell them apart, and both were played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) equally reluctantly made room for me.

  ‘It’s too late to join in this round,’ my wife continued, expertly feeding marbles into the tube, ‘but you can play the next.’

  She smiled merrily, her coralline lips peeling back from her tiny even white teeth. There was no malice in her – merely utter self-absorption. Hud – or Frankie – who was modishly shaven-headed (or perhaps simply bald), and who had once directed her in a breakfast bar commercial, fouled up his go and as the tube lost its marbles they all cried, ‘KerPlunk!’

  I played with them for an hour or so while an ancient Madonna album gently vogued through the sound system. This and the KerPlunk players’ clothes were the only contemporary props – for we had bought the house fully furnished, complete with the splayed bearskin, the miniature church organ, the looming tallboys and hammered-brass aspidistra pots. Glass domes cluttered with songbirds stuffed in mid-flutter stood about on occasional tables, while a vast mezzotint of a Holman Hunt leant against the coffered panelling – I had always felt a deep sympathy for the parasuicidal sheep it depicted, which were huddled together on an insufficiently vertiginous grassy knoll.

  Talk was of reality TV shows and the indiscretions of the junior Royals; a new face cream was passed around and smelt. Around eleven I said my goodnights and went to bed with a glass of water. Pa
ssing along the hall I was seized by the police lights glaring through the panes of the front door, and so detoured into the drawing room. Here it was even brighter, the radiance lifting the rug’s pattern – trellises twined with the tail feathers of peacocks – so that it floated in the must.

  The forensics team were still out there – two of them, seated in the road with their backs against my neighbour’s car. There had been no Vorsprung durch Technik, and, while it was no longer a newborn whale, nor was it a shiny aerodynamic status symbol. Instead, a pre-war Packard dusty and alone in a four-car garage scattered with dead leaves. What was it William Holden had said when the repo men took his car?

  A disturbed night followed. I slept poorly on my narrow canvas cot, not helped by the screeching and giggling that floated up the stairs into the small hours. In the morning I found the superannuated child stars – three, maybe four of them – eating Sugar Smacks at the oval mahogany dining table, which was still littered with KerPlunk straws, marbles, chocolate-stained mugs and Bacardi Breezer bottles. The pathos of Macaulay Culkin’s bare elbow in a smear of spilt milk was ... indescribable. Frankie – or was it Hud? – had lumped up a bed out of cushions and lay spread-eagled in the corner of the room, snoring noisily.

  Mark Lester accompanied me to the end of the road and, standing either side of the crime scene tape, we said our goodbyes.

  ‘Look after your mother,’ I said as I kissed him on his greying blond curls. ‘She may be a little daffy, but she has a good heart.’

  He removed my hand from his shoulder with professional courtesy, then enquired, ‘Will that be all, Mr Postlethwaite?’

  Each purposeful stride kicked me free from the entanglements of my life, until a reveal shot done with the side of a Number 87 bus exposed the Wandsworth Road, its multicultural parade of food premises – The Sea Lamprey (Muslim fish and chips), Twice as Nice (Carribbean), El Golfo (Portuguese pasteleria) – marching beneath yellowing London brick and the arched eyebrows of gothic rendering. I was safe now, walking out of town on a June morning – if I could be captured at all it would be possible only with a hand-held camera, fitted with a revolutionary lens capable of embracing the paradox of the human visual field, with its saccadic pans, zooms, tracks and stills spuriously contriving a synoptic unity.