by Luke Davies
In the parlor at Yoakum Boulevard my mother lay in her coffin, just thirty-nine years old. It is really very difficult to see the physical lineaments of a face, of clasped hands and the bulge of feet, and try and separate from that irrevocable stillness the one who thought, who lived and breathed, who smothered me with kisses. All right, she went a little too far, perhaps. But I have never been loved like that. She would have laid down her life for me. She would have suffered every germ and every calamity.
For a minute or two I stood alone at the coffin. I felt, forlornly there, a searing thinness and a desperate panic, as if the oxygen had been sucked out of my body. I bit my lip. I tried to focus on her face through brimming tears. I had never known her to wear her make-up in that way. Or so much of it, at least. On the one hand it seemed an affront to her dear memory. On the other hand it hardly seemed to matter now, and numbness seemed an appropriate response. The lid would be closed in an hour or two. I ran my fingers along the polished grain of the coffin rim; fingers that had once touched that hair and those lips.
The rest was rather a blur. There were many relatives, much somber darkness in the grand old Yoakum house, all cedar and velvet curtains. It was decided that Aunt Annette would move into the house, to look after me while I was there. Which wasn’t to be long. Clearly it would be best for me to return to the patterns of school life at Thacher.
They treated me kindly on my return. I liked it there; I liked getting away from the sadness. At Thacher I quite literally smelled the future. I sensed the closeness of the adult world that waited. I felt a sudden lightness, too, as if a mother is not just pure, weightless love, but a measurable mass, strapped invisibly to the shoulders, making every step heavier. When mine died I felt for the first time connected very deeply to every plant and every insect. The blazing beauty of the world rang out like a bell.
On my first day back at school after the funeral, I rode my horse out through the sagebrush and the scrub oak, far away from school as the sun began to set. Deep shadow filled the gulches and ravines. We cantered through soft soil. The crickets had all stilled. When I was low in a gulch the sun went down behind the ridge. But when I came back up it rose again. I sat astride my horse and watched it set a second time. The horse whinnied softly. It seemed somehow I’d gained a day.
Memo, 1951: Coats
I want all coats that need to be cleaned to be cleaned and hung together some place. I want the same thing done with the trousers and hung together away from the coats at least five feet. This may be in the same closet, but only if large enough to accommodate the insulation provided by the indicated space. I want all shirts and everything else laundered and put in a container of some kind. A white cardboard box is preferable to wood. It is not good to leave these in the laundry boxes, however, because there are other items in there, too. All pockets should be emptied. This means pockets in shirts, coats and overcoats. You may consider that all coats and trousers which are hanging in the closet are empty. But any coat or trousers that you pick up from a chair or anywhere else should be searched. Whatever you take out of the pockets should be placed in the proper category. I want you to think like me and be on your guard about contamination. I want to thank you for thinking ahead about this.
VISTA DEL ARROYO, 1923
I NEVER GRADUATED from Thacher; in the end it never mattered. I was beginning to see the way in which money changes one’s interactions with the other human beings. I was torn between staying and moving closer to this life I knew awaited me: Los Angeles, the oasis. But what surprised me most of all was seeing Father weak and insecure after Mother’s death. In letters he was lonely and bewildered. He’d never been effusive in telling me he missed me.
I can’t get a grip on myself, he wrote.
I’m terribly lonely without you, he wrote.
I miss your mother terribly, he wrote.
I hope you are all right, I wrote back.
I passed my arithmetic, I wrote back.
One day, about a month after Mother died, Mr. Sherman Day Thacher called me to his office once again. Father wanted to pull me out of school. There were only two months left until graduation. Thacher thought it would be best if I were to remain there on equal footing with all the other boys. If I were not to receive any special treatment. For I was, after all, doing well. I was gaining in confidence. I was enjoying my time there. I could hardly disagree with him.
Come back to Houston, Father wrote. Your Auntie Annette misses you terribly, too. You can start working in the business.
I wrote that I thought it best if I first finished what I had begun.
He wrote back and suggested we all move in together to the Vista del Arroyo, the retreat in Pasadena where we had occasionally holidayed. It was quite a different matter from Houston. It was hard to resist the thought of all that sumptuous pleasantness. Or the additional lure that my cousin Kitty would come across from Texas and stay with us, keep me company over summer. Or the allowance Father promised me, of five thousand dollars a month.
So we moved west with Auntie Annette and Cousin Kitty into the Vista del Arroyo. There were long Pasadena days so aflame with bougainvillea that I had trouble finding reason to leave the bench in the terracotta courtyard, where the gurgling of the birdbath rang deep behind my eyes. One day a great white bird flew high overhead: I imagined him happy as a lark. The momentum of stasis could sustain itself till hunger or discomfort came along. Of course now, with the Empirin and all these vast spaces, I am better with the stasis and can hold off far longer on the hunger and discomfort. But back then I was sixteen; you could hear my bones crackling as they grew, like acorns popping open on the hot summer days.
Houston was a swamp; pretty Kitty was dazzled by the sharpness of Pasadena County. It wasn’t just that creaking of the bones; all sorts of highways were unfolding in my blood, and spending time with Kitty near drove me crazy. Every minute was delicious. We strained against the tides of propriety. We never said a word. We didn’t have the language. By the pool we lay wet on the warm concrete. My eye closest to the sky was closed, but the one against the concrete I could open in secrecy. For some time, contented, I watched the downy hairs on Cousin Kitty’s kneecap. They were, quite literally, transparent in the sun. On certain nights I may have spilled my seed in bed, extrapolating from single hairs and concrete-dappled thighs the sublime surrender of the flesh. At times ever since the whole world has opened up in this unexpected transparency.
Auntie Annette watched over us at the Vista del Arroyo. Father was mostly away on Hughes drill business. Or spending the proceeds throwing parties on some yacht. I chaperoned Kitty to many movies. There is something very stimulating about sitting in the dark theater with all sorts of tensions, explicit or implicit, in the smoke-filled air. Cousins. That bright projected beam and the mayhem of sex on the screen. Everything was just beginning then. The way everything would turn out, I mean. The movie business, the show business, was so new, no one really had any idea of what would happen next. But I had a growing sense I wanted to be there in the middle of it. It was all just possibility: superheated blood, cool theaters, Kitty at my side while summer afternoons blazed white outside. And yet I knew I was witnessing something simply ready to burst.
Sometimes I just had to get out of there. The driver might enquire if I was planning to go to college that day. (A carefully placed donation from Father meant that I was allowed to attend classes at Caltech, though since I hadn’t actually graduated from Thacher School I wasn’t officially enrolled.) I enjoyed spending time in the metal shops, but the truth was I spent less time at Caltech than Father would have liked to believe. On the other hand, I made good use of the Duesenberg he put at my disposal. I drove and drove, some days leaving the driver at home with nothing to do. You could take the ridge line of the mountains through the Ten and the Sixty-two all the way to Joshua Tree. In winter you could be driving through snow in forty minutes. Back then there were still mountain lions, to whom all of Los Angeles, glowing and sparkling
down there in its bowl, must have been nothing more than a fabulous flitting dream of light on the periphery of their prowling.
The century was waiting. From Father’s drill bit, money rained upon me. And three times a week, from out on Haber Field, I took my flying lessons. I loved being among the aviators, those Christs flying heavenwards faster than rockets.
Father was unenthusiastic, but I wanted to be a pilot. In the open cockpit of a Sopwith Pup I felt so much power coursing through my biceps and fingertips that no speed seemed improbable and no glory unobtainable. Los Angeles spread below me like the original garden, everything contained therein. In one vast Sopwith circle I could pass above every climate and microclimate. Dry gulches east of Lucerne Valley, the canyons slicing the Hollywood Hills like ripples, snow up north in the Tehachapi Mountains, valleys of orchid and fern, creepers cooling the stucco walls of the Los Feliz mansions, dust rolling over the land past Victorville—everywhere coolness and deep shadow offset violently by a burning nakedness of light, so that luminosity and infinite space were a kind of prison in themselves. And beside it all, deeply and monstrously elegant, lay the ocean, blinding airmen with the ruffling and flashing of its diamond-crusted surface.
Then, in January of ’24, Father’s heart burst wildly, and he died.
His last great act had been to increase my allowance from five thousand a month to five thousand a week. He was a man whose sense of priorities I loved.
Leaving childhood was like pushing through a semi-transparent membrane. There was a long slow elasticity, a give and a resistance, before the pop of maximum tension and the tearing of the fabric. And all the world was hymen then.
VEINS
PERHAPS A MORE polite way of looking at it would be to say that for a very long time, for a lifetime in fact, I had been pinioned between the overattention my mother paid to me and that which my father paid to himself. Then they both died; I shot out from between them like a cannon. So in the summer of 1924 I went to Europe with Dudley Sharp, my Teedyuskung Brave, American dandies the both of us, eighteen years old. Europe is an old-fashioned kind of place. Its people are peculiar. Mother had died less than two years earlier; Father less than six months. I was gathering breath before returning to Houston for a showdown with my grandparents and uncle and other family members, who thought a European tour just the antidote to a young man’s pain and grieving. I saw Big Ben. Saw breasts at the Moulin Rouge. Bought a mohair coat on the Boulevard St. Germain. Went boating off the Amalfi coast. Could not get a good steak anywhere.
Dudley had been, I suppose, my only friend. His father had been a partner in my father’s drill bit company until he’d died in 1915. My father had been generous with Dudley and his mother in the buyout. Dudley had helped me with homework. (I was not the academic type.) He lied for me when I brained Charlie Post with a rock lobbed from our opposing hummock. We had been playing soldiers: Charlie and his friends were the Huns and the rock was a hand-grenade. I thought no further excuse was needed. But Dudley lied the proper way, by denying I actually did it. He was a boy whose words carried weight. Then for a few years I was at Fessenden and Thacher while Dudley stayed in Houston. We would see each other in the holidays. But the drift was beginning. By eighteen it seemed more like a rupture, pleasantness of Europe aside. Because at some point you need to strike out and make your own way. And there are too many habits, there is too much intimacy from childhood. We knew each other’s weaknesses. He knew so well how all those years earlier the other boys had picked on me, the momma’s boy. One likes to supersede the remaining forensic evidence, to clear the way for the future. Dudley was my last tie with the past.
So Europe with Dudley was tinged, for me, with that sense of a predeveloped nostalgia looming for future loss. Nonetheless, boating off Sorrento was a splendid experience. We were men now. There were awkward but still romantic assignations in Rome. Language-wise, we all got by on a minimal diet. There was a sickly smell of sweat masked by too much perfume. It was hard to work out the exchange rate.
Back in Houston I had a legal battle to fight, the first of many that would scatter themselves through my life. Everyone was out to plunder my father’s company and good work. I didn’t want to wait until I was twenty-one to inherit the seventy-five percent share that awaited me. I wanted to own it all, now. Complete autonomy is the only way to make one’s vision pay. Texas civil code allowed me to be declared an adult if I could convince the court I could handle my own affairs. This I did, to the consternation of my relatives, in front of Judge Walter Montieth (my father’s friend) on my nineteenth birthday. Then I mortgaged Yoakum Boulevard and borrowed on the tool company’s assets and bought out all the relatives for one-third of a million dollars.
And it was that simple. I was free.
Emptying the coffers was a radical form of starting from scratch, but at nineteen that looks and feels about right. And I could do it. There were more than fifty thousand wells in operation at any given time, all around the world, at thirty thousand dollars per lease, drilling through crust and rock, into the underflow. Veins, veins. Everything is either flowing toward the heart or away from the heart, but everything is flowing. I wanted the tool company to run itself. I knew precisely where I wanted to be: back in Los Angeles, making movies, and learning to fly. But Auntie Annette pushed me into the marriage with Ella first. Not one of us is not burdened at some point with the foolish mentalities of youth, where one simply goes with the flow of momentum. Thus, Do you take … Do you take … and I said, I do; though, of course, I didn’t.
THE ELLA-BONE IS CONNECTED
TO THE BILLIE-BONE
YOU NEVER MET Ella, I’ll say to Jack. She was gone before your time. Where we came from, money married money. I was only nineteen. A ridiculous age to be hitched. How it lasted four years I’ll never know. Mostly I kept her in Houston out of harm’s way. Her endless cablegrams drove me crazy. The whinier she became the more I froze up. I couldn’t stand the thought I was being manipulated. The marriage never really got off the ground, Jack.
We tried to make a go of it; instead we made a hash of it.
Toward the end I put her out into a house on 211 Muirfield Drive in Hancock Park, Los Angeles. I’d started seeing other women by now. It was all rather close quarters. I was gaining in confidence. Hollywood was hotting up. I drove a crimson Rolls. There was a desperation in the air already then. We were all of us desperate. And there were so many women willing to compromise themselves.
Ella wanted to like Los Angeles. She tried.
In March ’29 she threw a big party at Muirfield Drive, hoping to bring the two worlds together: her high-society people, all those moneyed Texas morons, and my Hollywood friends, fun people, really a lot of fun. I arrived late (I had been fucking Jean Harlow in the broom closet at the Cocoanut Grove), but the tension was already well established and an awkward divide remained between the two groups.
I was never one for small talk. Well, I think you know that already, Jack.
Soon after this Ella moved out of my life for good. I was relieved to be relieved of a big part of what was annoying me. She was like a mosquito. No, she was like a tenant living rent-free inside my head.
Clutter is so bad for your health. Billie Dove, on the other hand, was the certificate of wellbeing. In 1929 I was twenty-three, she was twenty-four, I was nothing (nothing yet), she was Hollywood, I was scared of my own shadow, she was pure light. I had seen her in darkened theaters for six years already by now; in fact I had first seen her in the flesh across a crowded room at one of Uncle Rupert’s parties in 1923, when he was writing screenplays for Sam Goldwyn and I stood in quiet corners, seventeen years old and gangly as all hell, staring at the starlets.
I saw The Black Pirate, a silent film, in 1926. Douglas Fairbanks’ father dies in his arms, the victim of a pirate attack, and Fairbanks, secretly vowing revenge, joins the pirate ship, bides his time, and kills the old captain. They board a merchant ship and in the plundering find Billie Dove hidden in a hold
. The pirates are about to rape her when Fairbanks sees by the emblem on her necklace that Billie Dove is a princess. He tricks the other pirates into letting her go. He rows away with Billie.
She says, You risk your life for me.
Fairbanks replies, I would do more—and give it.
They go to kiss. In movie houses I had studied the kiss for years, I had dreamed of perfecting the art. But I never believed I would one day be kissing her.
Because eventually we were introduced, at Victor Hugo’s Garden Room, and then one night there we were, on the beach at Malibu, kissing. She dug her fingernails into my scalp. Somehow one expects the lips of the famous to feel different. But they are not so different after all. And do you remember those little button lips, that little heart-shaped pout, Jack, that was the fashion on the actresses in the silent films? She had nicer lips than that in real life.
She had a real body. She had real eyes. Her fingers were chubby. Her dark hair gleamed. It was quite an odd experience. I could cup and squeeze her buttocks in my hands. Years later it would come to mean nothing. Not nothing, Jack. I’m trying to say I got used to it. I’d see a beauty on the screen, and some months, or weeks, later, I’d be lying with her in the flesh.
They’re all gone now, of course, and I get to watch them on the screen again. But Billie was the first like that.
We sailed across to Santa Catalina Island. We were so naked on those crisp sheets: coming, I was astonished by the glory of my cock.
I was waking up to myself and to the world and to me there in it.
When you thrust into Billie at just the same moment that the hull thrusts into a dip between rolls of swell, you are effectively weightless, pushing into nothing. There is nothing to resist you. Nothing. Even then I began to know that all of this, this life, this everything, was filled with zeros; look deep into their heart and the real world appears.
