by Eve Babitz
And now I had come to see Michael Gazzo in his rented apartment in the middle of downtown Hollywood.
The apartment was barren of personal effects. Gazzo rented it when he discovered that he couldn’t abide the Holiday Inn. A couple of blocks away, three days before, an eighteen-year-old kid had shot a policeman in the head and a dragnet had been thrown out over the area so thick that Gazzo couldn’t even get out to go to Paramount and pick up his check. The kid had been captured the next night after holing up in a motel for four hours. He finally gave up saying, “I didn’t do it.”
“I didn’t do it,” Gazzo said, about the Lost Hour. “It was their fault. You see, the whole thing was their fault, babes, and I’m gonna tell you why.”
The story, which started somewhere in the middle, of course, came out like this: the dressing room didn’t have a bathroom.
The chauffeur was late and didn’t know what stage they were on. The dressing room had to be shared with two other guys who were supposed to be FBI agents. There was no men’s toilet on the sound-stage. The man who was supposed to play Gazzo’s long-lost brother wasn’t introduced to him until ten minutes before they started, and then, it turned out, the guy spoke no English at all. And last but not least, nobody told him where to go for lunch.
“So I went out the front gate to this bar where it was dark and had four Scotch and sodas. And, babes, I don’t get drunk on no Scotch and soda. It was just that since I was working, I hadn’t eaten all day. Who can work on a full stomach? And I don’t care if you play this tape for Francis. I was the reason for the scene! It was Pentangeli’s testimony that was the reason those four hundred people were all standing around. And the driver didn’t even know where the fuck the stage was!
“A lot of people forget that actors are people,” Gazzo said, “and they aren’t paying us to be people. They’re paying us to get it up twenty times a day. They pay us a lot to get it up twenty times a day. And probably there are some guys who can do that too, but this is . . . Listen, babes, Francis comes over to me and says ‘Look scared’ and I’m thinking to myself, I’m not afraid of anything. The only thing that scares me is insanity. So in two minutes I transform all the senators, all the audience, my lawyer, the FBI guys, everyone, into lunatics. That’s my craft. I’m prepared. That’s what they’re paying me for. But my God, they should have shown me my brother earlier, ’cause I never even saw the guy. . .”
Then he changes without a missed step. “Whoever’s casting that thing is brilliant! Did you see that guy? My brother? Jesus Christ! What a brilliant piece of casting!”
•
And so goes the movie. It’s all like that. They hired the most qualified people on earth and when Francis could control the environment the way he did at Lake Tahoe, where the actors were isolated in a village which was the set in which they acted, things held together. Everyone knew where dinner was. Gazzo ran an actors’ workshop in the afternoons so that the actors felt like people and that acting was a dignified profession, an art.
But once things came to Hollywood, they fell apart for the mostly New York actors. In Hollywood, actors are left to their own devices.
The huge old soundstages, the detailed sets, everything had to stop for one $10,000 hour because nobody thought to show Michael Gazzo where the commissary was, or to tell him how good he is.
And when your own body is what the finished product of your art is, there really ought to be a bathroom nearby. And two double Scotches seems like a good idea, babes, it really fucking does.
And I don’t care if Francis sees this or not.
3. THE CONVERSATION
Francis Ford Coppola, one hundred years ago, would have been writing grandiose operas about impossible topics (like bullfighters and cigar-rolling girls) because Coppola finds stories where everyone else is blind.
So Francis decided on a terrific idea about this guy who is the best eavesdropper in the country, is a Catholic, and likes to play the sax, alone, in his apartment. And this guy, see, does an ultra-impossible job recording an impossible conversation between a young woman and a young man in Union Square in San Francisco. Cindy Williams plays the girl and except for about three seconds at the end of the movie, the few minutes of conversation she has with the young man is the only footage of her. But that’s OK because it is repeated over and over, the same words, the same groan, “God,” when she sees a wino, collapsed on a park bench, the same mundane remark about “He must have had a mother . . .”
Her voice fades and grows louder, a repeated coda, as various meanings become possible and the conscience of her unlapsed Catholic recorder slowly turns on him like Chinese water torture each time she groans “. . . God.”
The film is called The Conversation, and in it, San Francisco, for once in its life, is presented as it must seem to conventioneers. There’s not one single little glimpse of Victoriana anywhere and the bridges are overlooked completely, as are nice shots of the bay, the hilltops . . . The Jack Tar Hotel, however, will never be the same—no matter how terrible it is when you’re actually there, what Francis turned it into is worse.
There’s a convention for buggers at the hotel—booths displaying new kinds of secret recording tricks ornamented with ladies past the age when they could make more money with their looks doing something else. Here, Mr. Caul, Gene Hackman, is obviously the hero. Once, it turns out, he recorded a conversation between the president of a Teamsters local and his chief associate which took place in the middle of the ocean on a boat twenty miles from anywhere else. That Mr. Caul’s recording seemed to have resulted in the death of the chief associate, his wife, and his child has churned up an inner conflict between the American Way of “Just Doing My Job” and what Caul Catholically knows to be a sin, murder. But it’s almost impossible to think of sin or murder at the convention, where everyone thinks you’re the craftiest mother alive in the world today.
Francis blithely presumed that this was a terrific idea for a movie. But they only finally let him try out his idea after The Godfather turned out the way it did.
4. THE GODFATHER, PART FIVE
They were in Reno first, then Las Vegas, then Hollywood; then it was “Do you wanna go to Santo Domingo?” (I heard that they had to keep the stars locked in safes at night so they wouldn’t be stolen as hostages and that the natives were unfriendly and that one twenty-two-year-old female crew member who’d been remarkably pure of heart when shooting began was now, under the influence of Santo Domingo, drinking with the grips, that Al Pacino was sick there, that people were coming down with a local bug which only a doctor examining one’s stools could detect . . .) Well, no, I didn’t want to go to Santo Domingo. But then they said, “You wanna go to New York and go to the Gatsby party?” Santo Domingo—no, Gatsby—sí!
New York was Part Five.
•
It was about a week before the end of March. My mother had been in New York two weeks before and described it as “balmy”—a description which I bore in mind as I packed. As it turned out, it was my mother who was balmy; New York was troublesome and horrendous, as crazy as it was overwhelming, and as cold as it had been eight years ago when I had left vowing never to return unless I had a suite at the Plaza and my own personal limousine.
•
My relationship with Fred Roos, struck up in the usual way that any of Fred’s alliances for progress are struck up, was decided when he realized that he could stand me and thought I’d come in handy and, besides, I went to Hollywood High. The Hollywood High Mafia. He’s the one who showed me a photograph of the time Hollywood beat Hamilton High at baseball. “It’s been all downhill since then,” he explained.
It’s difficult to make Fred Roos laugh, but once you’re on his A-list, you’re allowed to once, sometimes twice, a day. We are also allowed to make him furious—cold empty long pauses on the telephone. His A-list, besides me, includes Cindy Williams, Harry Dean Stanton, Monte Hellman, a guy named Brooks he was in Korea with, and the newest member—whom Cindy and I
insisted on for two hours one night at Tana’s—Ed Begley Jr. Jack Nicholson, too, is one, and so is Marianna Hill. I’m the only one besides this guy named Lloyd (Fred’s truest friend, the one who goes to basketball games with him), who is not really in the movie business. And his mother.
“When are you coming to New York?” he asked. Like grand Guy Grand, Fred likes nothing better than to make it “hot” for people. So it’s twelve midnight and he’s calling to find out when I am coming to New York and if I get a taxi in twenty minutes, I can be there by dawn and we can have breakfast. “They’re shooting the 1918 street scenes,” he added. “Robert De Niro is in it and your friend Bruce Kirby. And Francis wants to talk to you about that magazine . . . And we’re all going to the Gatsby party, lots of good eats.”
“Party?” I said. “A party?”
“Yeah, we’re all going. After the Gatsby premiere?”
“Are we going to the premiere?”
“No. A private screening.”
“What if I come tomorrow?”
“Just say what time,” he said, “and things’ll get rolling.”
My book had just come out a week before and a friend of mine had written a review of it in the Los Angeles Times that was so violently opposed to me in general and to my book in particular that I’d run immediately to the Las Palmas newsstand to get a Tucson paper to look for a job as a waitress.
Suddenly, cooling it in New York seemed like a sensible thing to do.
•
I hate planes.
I hate airports.
I hate packing.
I never know what to pack.
I hate being afraid.
I am always afraid when I travel.
“How do I get from the airport to you?” I asked.
“I’ll send a limo for you.”
Well, that did it. I started thinking about going to the laundromat and how long it would take to touch up my roots.
“Where’ll I stay?” I asked finally. (He was staying at the Sherry-Netherland.)
“Here,” he said.
How was I to know that when Fred said “here” he meant New York? He’d booked me into a place on Times Square called the Edison. I’d never heard of it but after I was all packed and humming the next day, I made one final call to my best agent in Hollywood, who was delighted to hear I was going to have such fun, delighted about the party, delighted about everything up until the very moment when I said the word “Edison,” and then she stated simply: “Don’t go.”
“What?”
“Don’t go. I refuse to let you stay at the Edison. It’s unsafe. Call them back right this minute and say you won’t go.”
“I just got an ugly message from you,” Fred Roos said after I had tried to call him back.
“Fred, you’re sticking me into the middle of Hell’s Kitchen.”
“Ed Begley is right down the hall from you. And your friend Bruce Kirby. All your friends are there. I thought you’d have fun.”
“ . . . Oh . . . ” I said.
“You’ve hurt my feelings.” He doesn’t mince words. For a producer.
“I’m sorry. I’ll see you tomorrow for breakfast. And if I can’t stand the Edison—there’s this other place I think I can stay.”
“Why do you always do this?” he persisted. “Why are you so obnoxious?”
“Because it’s the only way you’ll listen to me,” I admitted. “I’m jealous.”
“What’s ‘jealous’ got to do with this?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Another cold pause. “Well . . . OK . . . see you tomorrow. The guy’ll pick you up at the airport and take you here.”
Meanwhile, my girlfriend, upon learning that I was going to New York, called an old friend of hers who had a penthouse with a guest room and a private entrance, private keys. A penthouse in the upper fifties on the East Side. The only safe place in New York. The penthouse friend didn’t like women as anything more than friends, she explained, but he was a peach and I’d love him. (“You’ll love him,” they always say. “When you get to New York give him a call.” And you never do, do you? Because you know you’ll hate him and besides there isn’t time.) Members of the Gay Community have never liked me much the way they like my girlfriend, who’s “got great bones and ages well,” and it was only the sheerest and most utter desperation which would finally throw me into the penthouse of someone who was to become one of my most cherished friends.
*
The Red-Eye Special was hellish. I felt murderous rage at those who slept through it. We landed at 6:30 a.m.
My chauffeur looked like Al Pacino, only he was Jewish. He was an ex-cop wounded in the line of duty in Bedford-Stuyvesant; he knew supercops “Batman and Robin.” All the women in Los Angeles are in love with dark, fast-talking New Yorkers, and my chauffeur was a dear. (All the women in New York have posters of Redford on their walls. If they came to Los Angeles, they’d find Redford parking their cars and saving their lives on the beaches of Santa Monica. Redfords are a dime a dozen in L.A. Pacinos are de rigueur in New York.)
“Don’t take your purse with you when you go outside the Edison,” my ex-cop chauffeur advised me when he dropped me off at the Sherry-Netherland.
Fred was wearing pajamas and the same bathrobe he wears to pad around reading scripts in in L.A. Darling, darling Fred, all sleepy and darling Hollywood High.
“Two more hours,” he said, and went back to bed. He keeps his room so hot it’s embryonic, and I paced, took a bath, washed my hair, and wondered about the Edison.
At nine we went down to breakfast. He made three phone calls first. He always makes three phone calls right after he says, “We’re going right now.”
After breakfast, the chauffeur dropped Fred off at the Gulf and Western Building and then took me to the Edison. I wondered if I could stand the Edison. All the men in the elevator looked as though they were just waiting to open their overcoats and reveal the worst.
The bellboy opened the door to my room, looked in, and said, “Oh, good, the bed’s made up.” I gave him a dollar and sat down. I asked for Ed Begley on the phone and the operator said she’d never heard of him. I couldn’t remember Bruce Kirby’s last name.
I called Jay Rank, the penthouse friend-of-a-friend. I called him at work where he supervised a Seventh Avenue high-style clothing manufacturing house with four hundred people working under him.
“I was expecting you at 7:30,” he said. “Just go to my apartment, tell the elevator man, Scott, who you are and he’ll take you to my apartment.”
“What about the key?”
“Don’t worry about the key,” he said. “The door’s open.”
“You just leave the door open in New York?”
“In my building it’s all right. It’s owned by the Mafia.”
(They are not allowed to say the word “Mafia” in The Godfather because the Mafia doesn’t exist except in buildings where you don’t need to lock your doors in New York.)
By 12 o’clock I was opening the door of Jay Rank’s penthouse. Safe.
Huge ceilings, large white couches and chairs, space, a terrace, clean.
Three cats looked at me; one ran, one didn’t bother, and one, a Persian princess, came on purring. Ohhhhhh . . . home.
Thank God for the Mafia. Because of them I was safe and because of them Francis Ford Coppola was making another gigantic work of art.
“Gris, gris, gra, ca-ca pistasche,” I sighed, my Cajun great- grandmother’s voodoo chant for safety. And I put in a good word for the Mafia, the New York one and the Hollywood High one.
My bedroom at Jay’s was a shambles; boxes of photographs were stacked up three feet high on top of the bed. But it was a safe bed and I got the boxes off. The Persian came in to see how I was doing and when I put a beautiful patchwork quilt over the bed, she jumped on it to see how she’d look. Divine as usual.
“The Great Gatsby was boring pudding—$6.8 million, brought-in-right-on-schedule, boring pu
dding.”
*
The Persian came to the door looking worried. Jay Rank was still not home and it was almost six o’clock. I wished Jay Rank would get home so I could find out who he was. He had no rock-and-roll records, just Broadway shows and European singers. I knew that much. He had lots of flowers.
For a man who’d been up since 7:30 working in a giant factory designing clothes all day, Jay Rank looked hysterically immaculate and kind when he arrived.
“What would you like to drink?” he asked, removing his gloves and hat.
“My God,” I said. “How can you look like this? You’re so neat, you’re perfect, and I’m . . . I’m just from L.A.”
“Scotch?”
I followed him into the kitchen, where he filled up a silver ice bucket and I followed him back into the living room, where he filled two gorgeous Swedish glasses full of ice, Scotch, and soda. He smoked fine Shermans and had a Dunhill black lighter with gold trim.
From the time he came home, at about 6:30, until 1 a.m., we drank dinner and talked. He did not loosen his tie. He remained perfect and only I got drunk.
•
The plan was to meet on the twenty-ninth floor of the Gulf and Western Building, see The Great Gatsby, for which Francis had written the script, and try not to die. Then we were to get into the limousine, go to the Sherry-Netherland to change, and go to The Party at the Waldorf Astoria for “eats.” The party was supposed to be “black tie” so Fred had ordered up a tuxedo from wardrobe. Francis was so disgusted by the movie that he refused to change out of his corduroy.
Gatsby was boring pudding—$6.8 million, brought-in-right-on-schedule, boring pudding. But no use crying over spilt pudding. And besides, The Conversation was coming in for the home stretch, ten lengths ahead of everything else, smelling like a rose.
Everyone had forgotten about the roses.
Everyone had forgotten what they liked.
Except Francis.
“It’s a perseverance of vision,” he mentioned en passant one afternoon to a reporter. “That’s all.”
