by Eve Babitz
About two blocks away from the Columbus Tower, Fred called out to a Chinese gentleman who was passing on the street. The Chinese gentleman waved back and went on his way across the street. “That’s Francis’s business manager,” Fred laughed, embarking on a story which sounded like pure Francis. “He got a Chinese business manager and it really terrifies everyone. See, everyone knows that the Chinese are the best businesspeople in the world, right? So Francis got this guy, he’s had him for years, and whenever he has to have business meetings he says, ‘Wait a minute, I have to fly my business manager in’ and then they all just don’t know what to do when this guy comes in.”
Amateur theatricals, I thought to myself, even in business.
The Columbus Tower is eight stories high but each story is no bigger than three thumbs and they are all narrow and triangular-shaped and awkward, but on the top is a cupola, in blue. (Was my father right about why Francis moved to San Francisco?) When I was in the building years ago, the music business and other chic pastimes had all painted each office whatever color they thought best but now Francis had had all the paint taken off all the woodwork and all the walls painted white and the place, with its caramel-colored wood and white walls, looked like an old Breck Girl ad, pure and simple and daintily sensual. All the windows had pinewood venetian blinds on them and at sunset a color that I had thought only came from Siena shot through the rooms casting such a romantic glow that one could hardly talk.
The elevator was slow and ordinary and had room for about four people. It stopped sometimes at every floor just for the hell of it.
Fred and I dropped by the seventh floor where Francis has his office; it’s totally monkish except for the color of the caramel wood and the pinkish hues cast in through the venetian blinds. (Francis is a fool for Bertolucci and has his very own print of The Conformist, in which the venetian blinds played a big role.) Francis was not there but “would be back,” so Fred and I went to eat lunch.
When we came back, we found Francis in front of an editing machine with his hands folded across his stomach looking out the window.
They were rerunning the five-hour cut in the basement and Fred suggested that I should be allowed to go down and watch but Francis didn’t think “anyone should see it until it’s done,” then changed his mind and decided I could go watch until he was “finished” and could come take me over to City magazine.
The room in the basement was so small that it was hard not to trip over things, but I finally sat down and saw the “Havana” scene (shot in Santo Domingo), but I couldn’t help thinking things like “I wonder how they got all those extras to jump around like that?” and “God, Al Pacino looks tired.” Meanwhile, a man in back of me, named Walter, kept telling someone in the projection booth that this or that section should be relooped. The feeling of glamour just wasn’t in the air.
The only thing I noticed about the film, in fact, was that the color was gorgeous and the sets were heavenly.
A man I know who wants to be a producer is always quoting someone who said, “The worst dailies make the best movies.” But these weren’t the dailies. These were part of a five-hour monster that had to be edited down to three hours, and I couldn’t help wondering how they were ever going to do it.
Francis came in at last and offered to take me over to the magazine office.
•
Magazines are the most superior pastime of civilized man, I’ve always thought, and Francis, it seems, is not immune to such feelings himself. There is something about starting a magazine which is even better than setting out to discover America. All my life I’ve been starting magazines or been the sidekick of people who’ve just started them. There is no creative endeavor more fun than magazines.
Francis came to buy City because he liked the idea of a “service magazine” which told you what you could do and see in a particular city. The first time he showed it to me was up in Reno when they’d just begun shooting the movie. We were standing in his living room and he tossed the magazine across the room onto the couch and said, dramatically, “What’s the matter with this magazine?”
I picked it up. It felt awful. It was printed on newsprint and the cover was hideous. Inside were more articles about the Jefferson Airplane than anyone could bear to think about.
“The matter with this magazine,” I said, “is the artwork and the writing.”
That was in October of 1973, and now it was July of 1974, and those two things were still what were the matter with the magazine, although the artwork on the cover had improved and the quality of the paper was less untouchable. Francis had been interviewing potential editors and had found one guy who he’d thought for sure would be good because he’d worked for years at Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and other publications of that ilk. I did not envy the editor who had to try to turn City into something other than what it was. It wasn’t like starting your own magazine. It was like trying to save the Titanic.
The building which houses City is three stories high and Francis bought it. It’s only a block away from the Columbus Tower and it’s right next door to a little theater with a hugely baroque lobby and a small seating capacity, which Francis also bought.
“We went to the Chinese tea cake restaurant for lunch,” I told Francis, as we were on our way back passing the coffee shop which is the bottom floor of the Columbus Tower. “Why don’t you buy it?”
“I don’t just buy everything,” Francis said. “I just buy what I need. Like this coffee shop ought to be a cute little restaurant that sells cappuccino. But they own the lease.”
You’re thinking of starting a restaurant too? I thought. My second favorite thing to do is to start restaurants.
•
On the second day, Fred took me to lunch with Walter Murch, who had worked on the editing of The Conversation with Francis and was now doing The Godfather, Part II. “He’s not just an editor,” Francis told me, “He’s working on this with me.”
I’d just seen a piece of film of what I knew to be the end of the movie, since I’d read the script. I saw it in a room that had light coming into it on a screen as big as a TV screen and it wasn’t what I had expected at all. It seemed slower than the way I remembered thinking it would have been from the script and it seemed disjointed and flawed by unnecessary people.
“How’d you like the alternate ending?” Walter said.
“Alternate!?” I said, “I thought that was the ending.”
“No, we changed the ending . . . That’s the alternate ending.”
“Well, what’s the new ending like?” I asked.
He told me that it was very smart, a solution to one of the major problems they were having with the movie which is one of those way-back-there art questions about motivation. “It’s the same problem,” Walter Murch said, “that we had with The Conversation. Remember?”
Walter explained that in the first Godfather movie the problems hadn’t been the same, since when Al Pacino is first seen he’s entirely different from how he comes to be and yet we all remember what he was like at the beginning. “It’s like he’s this guy who is told that he has to swim underwater twenty miles to an island,” Walter went on, “and we see him before he goes under and then how he is submerged . . . But in this one, he’s still swimming underwater and we never know who he is, we forget, and it even seems that he never was anything else. We can’t tell if he’s telling the truth because he’s been lying so long, he’s turned so completely into another person, we never know who he is . . . So maybe with this new ending . . . If we . . .”
The thing about movies like The Godfather, Part II is that they absolutely must appear to flow gracefully from beginning to inevitable end. None of those washed-out artsy endings for this movie. It isn’t that kind of a movie. What is inessential must be cut away and what remains must convince us it’s essential, not like England after it won/lost the war.
My editing friend, Lynzee Klingman, said when I came back to L.A. and tried to describe the confusion, “Oh,
has it gotten like that? Yeah, it gets like that . . . I knew this girl who worked editing the first Godfather movie . . . She quit. She told me that Marlon Brando was awful in it and nobody knew what it was about or what they were doing. It was just a giant mess. She couldn’t stand it anymore so she just quit.”
It happens, then, with magazines and restaurants and wars . . . It’s so much fun at the beginning and you can envision how wonderfully it will turn out. And without warning the moment appears when what you’ve begun is no longer yours. The glamour flees and no one can remember it except perhaps Francis with that remark about “perseverance of vision” as he sits with his hands folded across his stomach, his eyes fixed on some point out the window with an idle editing machine in front of him agonizing with Mozart’s “rest,” the part that’s not there, cut out by the artist to make the remainder flow easily from beginning to end so people will have a nice movie to go to where they won’t be bored, and Francis can start on a new one.
8. THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL
We used to hang out at Barney’s Beanery for years before Barney died and say, “I wonder who’s going to write the Barney’s novel?”
Suddenly Ed Kienholz made his huge construction of Barney’s and that was the end of it. The Barney’s novel was executed.
In New York, people used to say, “I wonder who’s going to write the Great American Novel?” When I came out of the screening of the final, three-and-a-half-hour Godfather, Part II, I knew that Francis had finished off the idea. The Great American Novel is two movies based on a book that Mario Puzo once told me he wrote “with one hand tied behind my back.” It’s funny no one thought of it before.
“How do you feel?” I asked Francis, once the film had come out and the lines were circling the blocks.
“I’m glad people like it,” he said. “Now I want to get City on its feet so that it will break even . . .”
“And then?”
“What I really want to do, Eve, is to start a radio station. That’s what I really want to do.” There was a pause on the phone.
“You know, Francis,” I said. “Your movie is really a masterpiece . . . You know how I can tell?”
“How?”
“It’s flawed.”
“Thanks.”
“A radio station, eh?”
“A little radio station,” he stressed.
Just like The Godfather was a little gangster picture.
9. THE PERSEVERANCE OF VISION
I used to watch them, those guys with their maroon and white sweaters at Hollywood High, their handsome faces and their invincibility and the way they smiled and said Hi. They were the casual popular young men who were taller and smarter than the rest of them and if you weren’t one of the fifty or so girls who were their rightful mates, they rarely tossed one of their Hi’s your way. The most you could hope to be if you were on the outside was an observer, a receiver of secondhand gossip, a chronicler of The Way He Looked at Her in Physiology 1 and the Way She Looked Away.
Whatever we were all going to be when we grew up, I used to think, will never be anywhere near as vivid and bloody as this. And because we were in Southern California—in Hollywood, even—there was no history for us. There were no books or traditions telling us how we could turn out or what anything meant.
The years passed. The successes turned out to be: the most beautiful blond with the green eyes who married an insurance salesman and moved to the Valley, where she’s living happily ever after with three children, not even divorced; the tall strong young football player who teaches art in a high school in downtown Los Angeles; the nervous, brilliant guy who is being nervously brilliant over at Warner Brothers directing his first movie; and the girl with the flaming red hair who is the director of a stewardess school and lives in Marina del Rey.
And whenever I run into one of them, no matter what has become of him or her, I feel a kind of curious affinity with them, because we have managed to live so long after graduating from Hollywood High, because we have managed to live at all once we got out of there. For Hollywood High never pretended to be a microcosm of real life. Everything that we knew about real life, everything we gleaned from books and movies and history classes and comic books, had snow in it.
On the day before Thanksgiving, when they began putting up the giant tin Christmas trees along Hollywood Boulevard, we had to bow to the realities of real life as determined by the rest of the country, the world.
Perhaps it is this shared empty confusion about reality that draws me to the alumni of a Hollywood childhood, those tin Christmas trees tipped white for snow. Those Christmas cards where everything is peaceful and white.
Very few of those guys in their maroon and white sweaters and their easy walks have survived real life. The casual nonchalance which we prized them for has been dashed to pieces by the real world which, even in Los Angeles, exists. The fierce battle on the baseball field has been plowed under by the fierce battle some of them have just getting up in the morning.
Out of all of them, I know only one who remains practically identical with that image I have of the boys as they walked across the quad and said Hi. And he once told me, showing me a picture of himself as he was the day that he hit the home run that won the game between Hamilton and Hollywood, even he told me that it’s been all downhill since then. And he’s probably going to spend the next twenty or so years of his life winning Academy Awards and mixing with a lot of dazzling people like he did at Cannes the year the movie he coproduced won “Best.”
He was the sports editor of the Hollywood High newspaper when Carol Eastman (who wrote Five Easy Pieces) was editor. “But it was so hard to write,” he told me, his casual grin flashing the past into the present. “I decided that I didn’t have to write. I’ve been happier ever since.”
“You’re a bastard, Fred Roos,” I told him. “You make all the rest of us write and you get to go around being the producer and the casting director and meeting all those people and people like me have to try and think up good ideas to tickle your fancy.”
He laughed. “You don’t have to do that. You don’t have to do anything. I’m not making you write.”
But even as I wrote the above and even as I sat there, I was so pleased to be at last in the company of one of those tall, sweet young men who once wore maroon and white sweaters, that I was faintly delirious. It’s not as vivid and bloody as it would have been. But then we’re in real life now, not Hollywood High, and it’s about art and money and Francis Ford Coppola and Paramount. It’s about power and glory and casting Al Pacino’s wife. It’s not Hollywood High, but nothing ever will be again.
And when I come into a room, Fred smiles, kisses me lightly, and always says Hi.
And once he said, “Hey, I’ve got a great idea. Why don’t you come up to Reno? You can write something . . .”
“What?”
“Anything . . . I don’t know. You’re the writer.”
Francis once told me that when he went to Le Conte Junior High School (where one-third of everyone at Hollywood High came from) he couldn’t think of anything but the girls. “They were so fantastically beautiful,” he told me, “and they walked around every day at lunch in a circle, around and around and around. I never forgot it.
“I used to wonder what they were like and why they kept walking around and around and around and why they were so fantastically beautiful,” Francis said. Francis, who went to twenty-six different schools when he was growing up in all parts of the country, must have seen those Christmas trees before Thanksgiving too. He, too, had a patch of time with no history and he must have decided to invent his own because he has, through a “perseverance of vision,” invented a way to be an artist through movies—and historically that’s next to impossible. The movies, like the girls, went around and around and around, and some were beautiful and Francis wondered what they were like, only this being real life, of course, by the time he found out, Hollywood was on the verge of collapse. The beautiful girls have becom
e pale in remembrance.
Time recently reported that The Godfather has made $145 million so far. The Conversation won the Cannes Film Festival, but hardly anyone went to see it. Francis and Fred became members of the board of directors of something called Cinema 5, a distribution company. Francis held a laminated copy of a check he got for $1,700,000 (for being the executive producer on American Graffiti), which he inspected thoughtfully one afternoon and said, “I wonder what I’d do if I were broke tomorrow. . .”
He added, “I wouldn’t mind being broke.”
Before that he’d said, “I’d like to start this place up in the North Pole . . . A sort of toy factory where all the toys were made by little people, children . . .”
Which is more or less the whole thing. Having the children make the toys is like having Francis make the movies.
Historically, of course, there is no precedent. But, then, Hollywood has always been unprecedented, ever since I can remember, when the girls walked around and around and around, their arms linked through the arms of boys in maroon and white sweaters in a past so vivid and bloody.
And even Fred, even Fred, who is still one of them, says it’s been “all downhill” ever since.
Coast
April 1975
MY GOD, EVE, HOW CAN YOU LIVE HERE?
WHEN MY sister and I were still rather short (before I turned thirteen and refused to go on any more vacations) my parents used to insist on wild adventures during which two weeks out of an otherwise perfect summer would be devoted to mountainous roads, flat deserts, or even the crise de folie when my father decided it would be a good idea to drive to Mexico City and back in our ’48 Pontiac in fourteen days. San Francisco, however, was a different story. My sister and I loved San Francisco and we couldn’t see the point of going anywhere else.
