I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  The “energy” of New York along with the “excitement” boils down to “terror” if you ask me. If I went around with my purse unsnapped the way I always did in L.A., older women accosted me saying, “Dear, your purse is open. Anyone could just grab your wallet.” They made me feel my purse’s being open was an affront. How dare I go around with an open purse when the city was so dangerous. I had to be some jerk from out of town. I’d tell them, “I don’t care.”

  But you have to care in New York or you’ll die. It’s not like L.A., where you can go around with your purse unsnapped or lost in thought even on the freeway. In New York, the gossip will get you if crossing the street doesn’t; for the gossip is so dense and thick that it hovers over the entire city like an enraged bear, ready to snap its teeth on anyone who isn’t fast enough to cover herself with alibis, low profiles, or return red herrings aimed strategically somewhere else. The gossip is like a lightning game of backgammon with rolls of dice leaving behind broken hearts, the dissolution of entrenched power, and awkward guest lists. Everyone (who’s left) waits for the next roll, eyes glued to the die. You cannot not care in New York. Even I know that. You’ll die just crossing the street. It’s exciting.

  It was always exciting.

  It’s changed, though, from when I used to live on the Lower East Side in 1966 and acid was in flower; and it’s changed from a few years ago when my first book was published. It’s even changed since last year when I stayed at Sarah’s in Connecticut and took the train into the city every day, braving the streets, going to magazine appointments.

  The people were all different somehow, I decided, but the ones I tried to explain this to insisted that New Yorkers were just glad because it was fall and because the winter rains and horrors which were predicted on TV every night at dinner hadn’t come.

  “No . . .” I would say, trying to think, “it was something else.”

  Then I knew.

  “It’s the dogs!” I exclaimed. “The sidewalks, you can walk on them! Those signs everywhere saying ‘Curb and clean up after your dog’ are working!”

  “Well . . .” some said, “you could be right.” Their usual New York contempt for hick opinions grew dull regarding my theory. Perhaps this was because they could walk beside me as we talked without having to guard every step they took, and we could look up into the sky at flocks of birds swooping low, flying south for the winter.

  Having been in New York before, I knew that buying clothes for, or in any way trying to figure out something suitable to wear in, New York would get me nowhere. They already have all the clothes in New York, there is no way one can hope to attain the look the women there have unless you become one of them, twenty-four hours a day, year in and year out.

  The best thing to do, I decided, was not anything. I would wear just what I wore in L.A. (only with a coat over it) and that would be that. What I wear in L.A. is old jeans and this grey sweatshirt with a hood that my boyfriend found at a garage sale for $2 and is my favorite shade of gray. And I like these old thirteen-button navy uniform pants which aren’t too bad and are intensely nondescript and can be rolled up into a foolproof sausage if you turn them inside out like sailors do and they’ll have no wrinkles. Then I have these sort of wretched muddy-looking khaki pants that everyone’s wearing. And these snaggletooth old sweaters along with one silver sweater (in case I got invited to a party). These were what I took with me for six weeks in New York. I could carry all of this—plus shoes—aboard the plane.

  Besides, I thought, when I was packing, if I need any clothes, New York is sure to have some. One must shop in New York, I remembered from experience, in order to know one is alive, practically.

  Bloomingdale’s has changed. This time, I can’t go into it. Last time and the times before, I could endure the break between life as we know it and Bloomingdale’s and enjoy the sensation just about; but, this time when I went to Bloomingdale’s, the information blitz was too overwhelming. All those people and all those promises. If I bought only $15.69 worth of carnation bath talc, I’d receive $79.95 worth of gift samples, and on and on. After only three minutes of Blooming-dale’s I was out onto the feckless sidewalks, back on earth.

  In the beginning, for the most part, the shops in New York this time paralyzed me into an inability to speak; though, by the fifth week, I was buying $130 cashmere cable-knit sweaters from André Oliver on Fifty-Seventh Street as if a person could just go into a store and do such a thing. I mean, four. Two for me, one for my boyfriend, and one for my sister. The sea-blue one was for my boyfriend, the gray for my sister, and the forest-green was for me—though the reason I got started buying these things to begin with was that they had one in a kind of neon violet. This color miraculously cured my paralysis from inside the store window; and before I knew it, I was barging up to this delicate young salesman in this luxury men’s sports clothes place saying, “Can girls wear these purple sweaters or just guys?”

  “You’re from out of town aren’t you,” I was told.

  And once André Oliver kicked through the door to my heart, it was no time at all before I was in Henri Bendel’s hovering over little wooden boxes with cats painted on them from the People’s Republic of China; they were filled with little black licorice mice that looked like they were carved out of onyx. Each box cost $7.50.

  “I mean, $7.50 for mice,” I said to myself.

  “But they’re so cute,” I replied, “and besides, they’re useful—you can eat them.”

  So I bought six boxes.

  I suppose I was lucky that the shopping lust didn’t overtake me completely until it was almost my sixth week and I flew away from such seductions. At least now I know what it’s like to be consumed by fashionable desires. But I can see how, if I lived in New York in real life, I’d plunge joyfully into enormous debt swathing all my friends in cashmere; and as they carried me off to the psychopathic ward at Bellevue, I’d be fashionably pleading, “Let them eat mice!”

  “Oh, please come,” Sarah had said, “the leaves . . .”

  By the first week in December, the first snow had fallen and I’d been able to walk invincibly down Madison Avenue in my new New York fleece-lined galoshes and my secondhand sealskin coat. I was so sentimental that I bought violets for my furs (for $12.50—silk violets) because New York always reminds me of Frank Sinatra singing. I had finished the television play, finished the grisly details on my book, met all the people who ran everything at an opulent East Side party where I wore my silver sweater and sailor pants and everyone said I hardly looked “too L.A.” at all. I’d seen the leaves alone with Sarah and seen them in Central Park in the crowds, faintly shopworn. I’d felt the “energy” and “excitement” for six whole weeks and not gotten run over.

  And there I sat watching the rectangular skyscape recede as the cab driver took me to the airport, when he turned and gave me this look, saying, “Lady, with that hat—you gotta be from California.”

  New York City lay sleeping curled up like a bear hibernating across the river, ready to wake up again the instant I come back next time.

  Vogue

  October 1979

  ANNA’S BRANDO

  IF BY PAGE five he’s a bad lay, then you have nothing to look forward to and who cares? In Anna Kashfi Brando’s Brando for Breakfast, we learn that Marlon Brando is “not well appointed,” is “selfish,” and was hardly ever home for dinner (much less breakfast, since he rarely woke up till after lunch); we get movie reviews, frank opinions on what a gauche genius poor Marlon is, and a flashily exposed solution to this man’s innermost mystery—that he’s really nothing but a poly-sexual and that he’ll stick it into any port in the storm, up to and including a duck. Anna wouldn’t mind, she explains, except that she feels his behavior is bound to taint their now twenty-one-year-old son, whom she always called Devi and Marlon always called Christian (after the boy’s godfather, Christian Marquand, the French director and very close friend of Marlon’s). Anna and Marlon were married for about a year a
nd a half back in the fifties, but it has taken her all this time to give us The Book. She probably would have kept silent forever except that she took an overdose of drugs recently and was in the hospital for a month or so and when she was all better, she knew the world need no longer go on in ignorance. She decided to tell all.

  •

  Anna and her coauthor, E. P. Stein, elaborately go into the story of Brando’s entire life and how his father thing and mother thing were the reason he turned out to be such a rat. The book includes details of how no screenplay, movie director, studio, or fellow actor involved with Brando was safe once he came into the room. It tells of all the naive young girls, all the illegitimate children, all the suicide attempts, wigs, sleeping pills, tearings up and down Mulholland Drive at midnight, and on and on unto the night of legal papers quoted at length. The last third of the book is almost entirely about judges and lawyers and what a liar Brando was but how everyone believed him because he was Brando and she was only this little starlet trying to raise her son and not take too many pills.

  Describing his appearance on their first date, she and Stein write: “He balanced a steatopygous form on squat, sturdy legs and moved with a lissome stride that conveyed a forceful yet feminine grace.” (Roughly defined, steatopygia means fat ass.) Nevertheless, she lets him take her out to dinner, and when more than two months later she goes to bed with him out of “curiosity” and he is a dud, you’d think she’d call it a day and date someone better appointed.

  But if she had, where would we be today? All her thoughtful insights would have been lost. Such as:

  “In short, Marlon Brando is modern gothic: grotesque, contradictory, impossible.”

  “Marlon’s sexual tutti-frutti comprise several shadier flavors.”

  “Marlon reserves his favors for Orientals, Latins, blacks, Polynesians, and Indians, both east and west. When I accused him of choosing ‘inferior’ women as partners to satisfy his need for superiority feelings, he was incensed.”

  “Marlon flaunted his dominance of women by humiliating them whenever they dared display an independent mien.”

  And last but not least:

  “A naive young girl probing her way through the world meets the suave seducer.”

  Well, not naive exactly—more like a B-movie adventuress.

  Anna Kashfi was born in Calcutta in 1934 of “an unregistered alliance” between her mother and father. When she was eighteen, she went to London to study, and though she was supposedly a naive young girl probing her way through the London School of Economics, she ran off to Paris with an Italian jet pilot. Unfortunately, in Paris she ran into her father, who was supposed to be home in India with Mom. Dad cut her off without a penny. Anna was forced into “modeling,” a pursuit she explains by saying she couldn’t type. Luckily, Spencer Tracy agreed to cast her in a movie with him. When the cast and crew moved from their location in Chamonix to the Paramount soundstage, she was whisked off to Hollywood. A week later, she was sitting in the Paramount commissary in her red sari and minding her own business when from across the room (where he was nuzzling Eva Marie Saint), the sly seducer clapped eyes on her. She did not, she says, even know who he was the first time he called and they went out, but it wasn’t long before someone told her, and perhaps who he was outweighed her objections to how awful he was, all squat and steatopygous.

  When I was sixteen, I took up with a band of vicious Hollywood starlets who were all older than I (real old, like twenty-two or -three). They spent their days working on tans at the Beverly Hills Health Club and devising diabolic revenge for schmucks who crossed them in any way at all. They spent their nights drinking martinis and wearing Jax dresses with necklines so low that their bulging breasts were all anyone could think about. They drove Thunderbirds, dated celebrities, and always knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was a prince for them, a handsome, rich, clever, hip prince who was famous, had famous friends, and drove a Cadillac convertible down the Sunset Strip in the afternoons listening to jazz on the radio. A man with a large appointment who was never selfishly premature.

  And a man who came home to dinner and stayed home, not like the man who was always running around with Rita Moreno—who left her wig in the bedroom, as Anna tells us. Marlon would have been perfect except that he had other ideas. But from afar—among those vicious starlets—Marlon was the ultimate score.

  •

  Not a single one of those girls found a prince—including Anna Kashfi. In her mixture of rectal conjecture and quotes from Pauline Kael cut in half so that they say the opposite of what was meant, Anna seems to speak for all of them—one long wail of howling outrage. A tirade against the audacity of the way things turned out compared with how they should have been. Marlon Brando has “toes (at least) of common clay,” she screams, and he did it to this duck in Paris besides! The world is no longer to be kept in ignorance of all Anna has suffered.

  Perhaps there’s something marvelous and brave about Anna and my vicious starlet friends, out for blood and evening up the score so long after everyone has gone home. But we do worry when we realize that Anna, though she’s out of the frying pan Brando-wise, might be someplace hotter with this E. P. Stein person cowriting her book. Anna seems to have a fatal fascination for sticking with the hopeless. But this time, instead of winding up in divorce, it ends up, after pages and pages and pages (I mean, who wants to hear Anna and E. P. Stein’s critical essay on Bedtime Story?), a book.

  I was almost gasping with relief upon coming across one small holdout during a time when Anna and Marlon were recently estranged: “Newspapers played up the theme of ‘Brando’s two loves’—France Nuyen and Barbara Luna. Miss Nuyen displayed her usual tantrums for the press, while Barbara Luna withdrew with grace. Asked her feeling for Marlon, she replied, ‘I’m not in love with him.’”

  Oh, Barbara Luna, tell us everything. What was he really like?

  Esquire

  October 1979

  THE GIRL FROM GOLD’S GYM

  THE GIRL in Gold’s Gym was standing with her face to the mirror and lifting weights. She was small, only about five feet three inches tall, but her arm muscles were perfectly defined, each muscle clearly showing, almost statue-like. Her calves were perhaps just a little too well developed to win a beauty contest. She wore a green workout leotard and a cutoff T-shirt stamped with a rose on the front; her torso was girdled by a wide leather belt, apparently the same kind of belt worn by most of the men there (who greatly outnumbered the women) to prevent their spines from collapsing under the strain.

  “Listen,” Lisa Lyon said when I came in, “just sit somewhere and watch; I’ll be with you in half an hour or so. I can’t really talk till I’m through.”

  So I sat down on the floor, on a green rug. Gold’s Gym is near the northwest corner of Second and Broadway in Santa Monica, California. Windows opened to Second Street and were lined outside by an audience of passersby who could not tear themselves from the sight of all those men with all those muscles trying to lift more and more and more. The atmosphere of seriousness inside Gold’s Gym came through in spite of continuous rock and roll FM radio blasting away. Everyone was suffering to a rhythm—maybe the wrong one. You couldn’t help thinking that Gold’s Gym should pipe in some Wagner, which, with its lofty aspirations and blond passions and force, would be so much more suitable.

  Lisa Lyon looked adorable.

  Her perfect little Bardot-Ronstadt face was framed in curls of chestnut brown caught up in a ponytail. Her brown eyes, edged by unmade-up eyelashes, sparkled, and her white teeth were perfect. Like all the truly serious people working out in Gold’s Gym, she wore Nike running shoes.

  In the center of the workout room at Gold’s Gym were machines for pushing and lifting weights backward and on your knees and in other superhuman positions. All around the walls of the gym were signs saying REPLACE ALL WEIGHTS and low racks lined with weights and mirrors.

  At the end of Lisa’s workout, she and her training partner, Jay Silv
a—who has a transcendently angelic smile above a body packed with wedges of iron muscles and covered with ebony skin—stood in front of a full-length mirror and reviewed what needed work. “Come in here,” she said to me when they finished.

  I figured we’d go into a dressing room where she’d change into something else so that we could go out for lunch, and indeed she did unbuckle that wide leather belt and take it off, but that was all she took off. She makes a point of wearing her workout clothes wherever she goes; it is her idea of spreading the good word. (To my surprise, I noticed she wasn’t sweating even underneath the belt around her waist, and I asked her why. She showed me another pad that encircled her waist underneath her T-shirt. It was designed to stimulate sweat—and it does—but Lisa just doesn’t look like she sweats.)

  “I started this bodybuilding two years ago,” she told me while we were still in the gym. “Before that, I studied dancing and kendo—that’s Japanese fencing. I wanted to be strong, and when I met Arnold Schwarzenegger, I saw there was potential to do something dramatic with myself.” (It seems that everybody who meets Arnold gets their life changed.)

  “I’d been an art student, I’d wanted to do medical illustrations, and I loved the suppleness and grace and understanding of power, plus”—she looked around as we were walking out of Gold’s Gym—“I fell in love with the scene.” And with that, she laughed this bad-girl laugh and her curls curled more roundly around her face, making her look even more adorable.

  Lisa went to University High in L.A. Her father was an oral surgeon; her mother, an interior designer. At UCLA, she was very political and studied criticism in its graduate film school, which, as everyone knows, is where in L.A. Karl Marx resides, at least in spirit. Today, at age twenty-six, she has a job reading and synopsizing books and scripts for American International Pictures, a job she can do mostly at home between Gold’s Gym workouts.