by Amy Ephron
One Saturday morning, Lisa and I stopped by to go for a hike we’d planned the week before with Honey and Shannon, and the house was a flutter of activity. Huge bunches of roses and Casa Blanca lilies were laid out on newsprint on the dining room table waiting to be arranged and accented with clusters of Beach grass and Maidenhair ferns. The good china and silver were set out on the sideboard. Honey was arranging flowers in crystal vases. Shannon was sitting on a stool polishing sterling silver serving pieces and flatware. Lupe, their Guatemalan housekeeper, was in a uniform in the corner, meticulously ironing cloth napkins and tablecloths. The Cristal was already open and there was a pitcher of fresh orange juice next to the ice bucket and the empty champagne glasses. There were croissants and blueberry muffins and a platter of gravlax with tiny triangles of dark brown bread and a bowl of raspberries with heavy cream. They’d clearly forgotten we were supposed to go for a walk, and we’d never seen Lupe in a uniform before. We were a little shy, at first, as we assumed they were having a party we hadn’t been invited to, but that wasn’t exactly the case.
Max was arriving. (Let me say that until this moment, neither Lisa nor I had ever heard of Max.) Max Hayes. Max was the reason Honey had left Atlanta. Max was the reason Honey had come to L.A. He was also the reason for a lot of other things, but we wouldn’t know that until later.
Lisa and I pitched right in, as was our wont in those days, with whatever was going on at the moment—furniture moving, silverware polishing, table setting, onion chopping, mimosas, wardrobe decisions, which generally involved discarding the first five or six choices on the bed or the floor. And when Max called from the airport in Atlanta and told Honey he was bringing two friends, it was decided that Lisa and I should come back for dinner.
When we arrived for dinner, there was a sedate black Cadillac Town Car parked in front of the house with a driver who looked a bit like one of the Queen’s Guards who’d taken a job moonlighting as a chauffeur. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and the big fluffy guard’s helmet had been replaced by a chauffeur’s cap, but the jowls, the bushy mustache, the eyebrows that curled up slightly on the ends, and the ruddy cheeks were intact, along with a British accent that to my ear seemed to hearken from Bristol rather than London. And he was standing at attention by the Town Car just in case anyone decided on a whim to hit the town.
It was one of those L.A. nights. There was a warm wind blowing, and the stars in the sky were almost as bright as the city lights visible from the picture window in the living room at “No Name Street.” The Cristal was flowing freely and the Wedgwood bowls were full.
Max was sitting on the sofa in the living room. He was diminutive and, as I would learn later, always perfectly dressed, with Brooks Brothers loafers and cashmere jackets if the weather was below 85˚. He had short, almost buzzed hair, a sort of Hollywood power cut before it was in fashion. He was a commodities trader, or at least that’s what I think he was, or a banker or something like that, and from the way his eyes followed Honey every time she crossed the room, it was clear, despite his cool demeanor, that he was madly in love with her.
As we’d heard that afternoon, over silver polish, gravlax, and mimosas, they were so in love, they’d been unable to keep their affair “private.” So Plan B: Honey had moved to L.A. while Max stayed in Atlanta to try to sort out his affairs. It was one of those complicated stories about how his wife’s father owned the company he ran with the dubious subtext that his wife “wasn’t well”—a euphemism for mentally unstable, fragile in some way that meant the divorce would utterly destroy her—which gave a gothic edge to the whole affair and the suspicion by some of us that it was a total fabrication. But Max was as mysterious as Honey, so none of us were sure.
Max had arrived with an enormous amount of luggage. The driver, Felix, apparently doubled as valet and had unpacked it all and moved him in.
“Do you think he’s planning to stay?” I asked Shannon when we were alone in the kitchen.
“No,” she said matter-of-factly, “if he was planning to stay he wouldn’t have brought her that diamond necklace and he wouldn’t have brought two friends.”
The diamond necklace was amazing. On a thin white gold chain, a big tear-drop diamond, I’m guessing 5 or 6 carats, surrounded by a white gold filigree diamond-shaped frame on which were six other smaller diamonds just for show. The friends were a little bit mysterious. I couldn’t tell what either of them did but one of them had just bought a Rosenquist so, in addition to what else he did, I assumed he collected art. Dinner didn’t start till ten. At 2 A.M., we were still in the living room drinking champagne and eating caviar and there didn’t seem to be any restrictions on the white powder in the Wedgwood bowl. So it wasn’t surprising that at 4 A.M., on some kind of manic spree, Max decided to buy Felix, too. Well, actually, he decided that what Honey really needed was a limousine company, and the first cog in the wheel was Felix (who, it turned out, Max had met for the first time that afternoon at LAX). It was kind of amazing to watch. “How much would you cost for a year, Felix?” Felix was a little cagier than you would think, and he negotiated a percentage, too.
That weekend, Max and Honey went out and bought the first of the fleet, a chocolate-brown Mercedes-Benz limo (compact, not a stretch) that blended in perfectly on the streets of L.A. It was sedate and elegant and didn’t draw attention to itself except for Felix, who was gaining weight from the good life and couldn’t break the habit of standing at attention by the car.
Oddly, Shannon seemed to use the car as often as Honey did. They never seemed to rent it out. And the rest of the fleet never materialized.
Max would come in and out of town, spending as much time in L.A. as he did in Atlanta. Honey was supposed to understand—after all, he had a business to run and the business was in Atlanta. He told her he’d told his wife that he was leaving her, but they needed a little while to get the children accustomed to it. The children?
Lisa and I were 23 and naïve, and the idea of children certainly hadn’t occurred to us. The children turned out to be 18 and 20, which meant that Max was probably a lot older than we thought, although I sort of understand wanting to go out with somebody who wore ties.
It was an arrangement not dissimilar, I suppose, to being married to someone who traveled a lot. Max would spend three or four days in L.A. as if he lived here and then go back to Atlanta. It was a little strange that Shannon lived there, too. But it seemed to work for all of them.
Max liked to live large and travel with a bit of an entourage so we were often invited to go out with them. Their favorite place to go was L’Orangerie, the sort of over-the-top, elegant restaurant on La Cienega that was famous for an egg served in its shell with Russian caviar and tuna tataki before its time. It was one the few places in L.A. where you had to dress up and Honey loved dressing up. They also loved the old-style romance of Chasen’s, even though it was a little downtrodden at the time: the elegant banquettes that were built for eight, the dimly lit room, the huge platters of crab, shrimp, and lobster appetizers, the sense of history. Honey used to order the Hobo Steak because it amused her that there was a Hobo Steak on the menu at Chasen’s. (I think it had amused Dave Chasen, too, which is why he put it on the menu.) But like I said, Honey got the joke, as long as there was a joke to get in the room. Money didn’t seem to be an object. The cases of champagne just kept on flowing. For a number of months anyway.
The first sense I had that something was amiss was Felix. I pulled up one evening and parked my car. Felix was standing next to the Mercedes, smoking a cigarette and drinking from a silver flask. Even from a distance, he smelled like bourbon. He’d usually open the car door for you and engage in some pleasantry, often as pedantic as, “How are you this evening, miss?” but polite nonetheless and always formal. I waved but he didn’t acknowledge my presence, almost as if he was in another world. I decided not to engage. Shannon and I were just running down the hill for sushi. I had my car so,
as far as I was concerned, his services wouldn’t be needed that evening. But it’s always a bad sign when the help starts misbehaving.
Shannon was ready to go. She didn’t even ask me in. She had on jeans, a t-shirt, a short Western jacket, and pointed boots with heels that made her look taller than she was. She looked like she was in a rush to get out the door. “Should we ask Honey if she wants to come?” I asked.
“She hasn’t come down for two days. She has a”— Shannon hesitated—“headache.”
“What’s wrong with Felix?” I asked.
Shannon whispered, “He hasn’t been paid.” That was the first hint I had that there was trouble. The second hint would be coming soon.
Shannon and I had an early dinner, and I dropped her off around ten and went home. At three in the morning, my doorbell rang. Let me just say, it wasn’t that unusual in those days for your doorbell to ring at 3 A.M.—a musician in town, a couple of friends who were on their way home, someone who didn’t want the night to end. I lived in South Beverly Hills, which was centrally located and seemed to be on everyone’s way from everywhere at any time of the night or day. L.A. hadn’t gone into full-tilt alarm lockdown yet (that would happen a few years later), and I generally opened the door to see who was on the doorstep even if I wasn’t going to let them in.
Honey wasn’t standing on the doorstep. She was sitting on it, up against the wall, with her knees pulled into her chest like someone on the streets of London in 1912 trying to get shelter from the rain, except there wasn’t any rain. Her face was streaked with mascara and she looked as if she’d been crying for days. The Mercedes was in the driveway, but Felix was nowhere to be seen.
I can’t remember if I made her tea or poured her a shot of brandy. Probably both. I remember that I built a fire because it seemed like something normal to do, and it seemed like something homelike and cozy, and she curled up on the couch under a cashmere throw.
It was a long time before she started talking, sort of residual sobs. It was Max but it wasn’t what I’d expected. He hadn’t paid the mortgage. This surprised me as I hadn’t realized that he paid the mortgage, and it took me a while to get the details but I soon learned that it was Max, not Honey, who owned the house on “No Name Street.” And the first clue that there was trouble had been when a default sign was posted on their door. I sort of thought it was a “good news/bad news” story. At least she didn’t owe 1.2 million dollars on a house that I now realized she couldn’t afford to live in at all.
“Shannon thinks we should have an estate sale and sell all the furniture.”
“What good would that do?” I asked, not understanding the concept at all but realizing, in that moment, that the screwball comedy they’d been acting in had just turned into Dinner at Eight (without the light touch of George Cukor at the end).
“Well, Shannon thinks, at least that way, we could pay the mortgage. But it won’t work,” she said without even giving me a chance to comment. “He’s being investigated by the SEC.”
In those days, this sort of thing wasn’t commonplace—white-collar crime wasn’t splashed on the front page of the papers every day. Bernie Cornfeld and Robert Vesco (but I think they’d even been in business with each other, so it was hard to count them as two things). Everyone knew what a Ponzi scheme was, but SEC investigations weren’t commonplace.
“For what?” I asked. I wasn’t surprised when Honey didn’t answer me, although I was certain that she knew. Myriad possibilities ran through my mind, insider trading, RICO charges, money laundering . . .
“I’m not sure,” she said. And then she added, very matter-of-factly, “I think they’re going to seize his assets.” There was a finality to Honey’s tone, as if she was already considering her options. There was no sympathy in her voice, no seeming concern for Max’s predicament, as if in that moment, she’d turned on a dime. “And if he thinks I’m one of his trinkets,” she added, “he’s sadly mistaken.” It was a little startling. There was a determination in her voice I’d never heard before, or else some self-preservation gene had kicked in.
She straightened up on the couch and had another sip of brandy. She went into the bathroom and washed her face.
“Do you want to stay here tonight?”
“I wouldn’t mind,” she answered.
When I woke up the next morning, she was gone. The bed had been perfectly made and except for the brandy glass on the coffee table, I never would have known that she’d been there at all.
Three days later, the house on “No Name Street” was shuttered, vacant, empty. No sign that anyone had lived there before. Except that if you looked through the old-fashioned grate of the peephole, the black tiles of the staircase were visible as if waiting for someone to make an entrance from upstairs.
Honey left town. I don’t know where she went. Shannon moved in with a friend in Hancock Park and started going to church every day. She talked about God a lot. Something had scared her, but I don’t know exactly what it was. I never really understood exactly what their dream was. Two months later, Shannon left Los Angeles, too. She said she had a rich cousin in Minneapolis and that she felt like going home and since her parents had died when she was little, it was the closest thing she had to home.
Max was indicted, although I’m not sure for what. And I hear he spent a little bit of time in a minimum security prison.
Honey called me six months later, “I’m he-ere!” she said, sounding a little Southern when she said it and as if she’d had a couple of glasses of champagne. “At the Beverly Hills Hotel.” This had a Southern lilt to it, too.
“How are you?”
“I’m in love,” she said, with an extra syllable in love. She didn’t tell me his name. “He’s Argentinian,” she said. “He’s in rocks.”
I didn’t know if she meant cocaine or jewels and, I think, I actually said it. “Cocaine or jewels?” as I remember her answer.
“Jewels, you fool, “ laughing a little bit because Honey got the joke. “I’d love you to meet him.”
I declined their invitation for dinner. Some little bell went off in my head about how the “high life” can turn on a dime. I never heard from her again. I hope she’s barefoot somewhere in South America with lots of children around her (I imagine her on a ranch with horses, taking trips every six months to a fancy clinic in Lausanne) and that she didn’t end up in a small town in Texas where the only oil in shouting distance is at the gas station on the corner, or even worse, a rich divorcée buying champagne by the case.
Six
Labor Day
There aren’t that many things that are a rite of passage, truly a rite of passage. A first kiss, that’s not really a big deal, it’s just a door opening to a second kiss. Or the fact that, now, you do kiss, if you know what I mean. Or for some of us loss of virginity isn’t such a big deal either except that you hope that you find someone better to sleep with the second time.
I don’t remember my first kiss. Oh, yes, I do. I was wearing red silk pinstripe hip-huggers that I’d bought at Paraphernalia. He drove a red Corvette and I’d lied about my age. He was sort of slick and creepy and a senior in high school, not my high school. And I think he parked, yep, actually parked on Mulholland. I should have known, just by the red Corvette, that he thought of himself as fast and had more than kissing on his mind. I didn’t. But maybe I’m just not a red-Corvette kind of girl. I remember being sort of pleased that we didn’t go to the same high school and that I would never have to see him or his red Corvette again.
I don’t remember my second kiss. I do remember the first person I was in love with (or thought I was in love with)—short-lived, as I moved to New York and he went to rehab. What can I say, it was L.A. and some things never change. In my own defense, I was not the reason that he went into rehab and I was fairly surprised at the substance he went into rehab for. I missed the signs and spent a long time thinking about how
I could have missed the signs. What I took for a laconic, laid-back nature was really a heroin addiction.
I think a rite of passage is, certainly, the first time you experience the death of a friend. But when the first person I was in love with died of an overdose six years later, I refused to believe he was dead. For years, I was certain I would see him, just there standing on that street corner; over there across the street in front of that bakery; just there in front of us, walking down to the subway. But every time I got close, he was gone.
I’m not even sure marriage counts as a rite of passage because who knows if that’s a permanent state.
But having a child is a rite of passage, a defining moment that puts you in a forever altered state—motherhood and all the responsibilities that come along with it.
