by Eve Babitz
I had been worried that the kind of people the Chateau used to attract—the kind of people who like to spill things, things like wine, blood, whiskey, cocaine, ashes, and bodily fluids, people like John Belushi, who spilled everything here one night—might no longer feel at home. Then I look further inside the room and see the Martha Washington bedspreads still in place and that none of the lamps match, and I know that it isn’t going to be too much of a shock.
In L.A., the impulse to tear down anything good but old and rebuild it crummy and different is so rampant that the only things anybody tries to restore are women’s faces. Now the Chateau Marmont is getting a chance to come into the present and be charming again, and even if the romantic depressiveness of the hotel is lost, I have to rise above my nostalgic despair and be glad.
Esquire
January 1992
THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS
IT’S DANGEROUS to call anyone the new James Dean, because even the old one found being himself somewhat impossible. You don’t fly around town on a motorcycle, drink and whatever else, earn a reputation for being difficult to work with, and acquire your death-Porsche—all by the age of twenty-three—if you’re not bent on departing young.
That’s why we love James Dean—he died before we even knew we were in love with him, before he could be found wanting, before the studios could cramp his style and turn him into an eight-by-ten glossy. The studio actually forbade anyone but its own photographers to shoot him, but fortunately lots of pictures were taken, leaving a legacy of incredibly elegant posing in New York–ish and western ways. We knew, both from stills and from the way he moved in his movies, that he was bad. Rock and roll. If he were still alive, James Dean would be cinema’s version of Bob Dylan, if not Neil Young.
Martin Scorsese is an Italian James Dean, and early Clint Eastwood was as James Dean as a Republican can get. Even Woody Allen might be James Dean if James Dean were a scrawny, Jewish New Yorker. Like Dean, Allen’s got the whine and the hunched shoulders. Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot was James Dean, and Sid Vicious was James Dean as a dead fool. Anything in the mainstream that is beautiful and rebellious and tragic is James Dean—rodeo stars, Jennifer Jason Leigh, beatniks, Magic Johnson now. James Woods is James Dean with a stinger. James Dean is what’s going on inside, underneath, while old men in suits lie from the podium.
In L.A. there are tons of unemployed teen idols, so actors with even a Hail Mary hope of being compared to James Dean are glad to play along.
James Dean was not a good role model, and yet all over America his posters still hang in girls’ dorms. Nobody could wear jeans like James Dean—not all the Calvin ads on earth will ever touch James Dean in Giant. Nor will anyone come close to James Dean on a motorcycle, even though today everyone is up to their ears in jeans and motorcycles. What the sixties proved was that the decade’s dreams didn’t work, because if they did, things wouldn’t be the way they now are. But we do still have Bob Dylan and Neil Young, and maybe the capitalist rampage here has been slowed and stalled by the James Dean element—maybe the reason America is nowhere near as bad, ecologically, as the Eastern Bloc countries have turned out to be is that James Dean was among us, promoting contempt for hypocrisy, encouraging the sentiment that led his contemporary, Allen Ginsberg, to write, “America, go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.”
Luke Perry says, “Being connected to James Dean is the scariest thing. He’s such a strong image, and it makes him look like the object of a game for me. And it’s not what I’m shooting for. I’ll try and be an artist, I don’t always want to be the brooding guy in the T-shirt, I want to play pimps and doctors and lawyers, cowboys. If only people will let me be an artist and not the next James Dean.”
Of all the young men being heralded as New James Deans, Luke Perry and Jason Priestley of Beverly Hills 90210 are the major teenage heartthrobs, mainly because of the characters they play on the show—the way they’re lit, and their sideburns. After seeing what happened with Johnny Depp, the Fox network has figured out that you can’t have too many teen idols. These two are total crush material—though the story line is always some do-good plot, who can notice when you’re in a love trance?
Perry says, “For whatever reason, we’ve all been hurled into the spotlight. I can’t go to the market to get anything to eat. Luckily, McDonald’s has drive-through.”
On the show, Priestley plays a supersensitive, down-to-earth, unbelievably sweet guy, Brandon. He’s the one you most want to be. The fact that in person he seems to be the same kind of man isn’t to say that he’s not a good actor. Like Michael J. Fox, he’s short and Canadian, but unlike Fox he refers to “priapism” in public. He bragged in an interview in Sassy, the magazine for juicy teenage girls, that unlike his character, he’s not the least bit innocent, that he smokes and drinks like any other twenty-two-year-old, and that he’s been living in L.A. for five years—enough to put an end to anyone’s innocence. He smokes and drinks like the old James Dean.
The youngest among the NJDs is Bojesse Christopher, who is only twenty-one and already a member of the Actor’s Studio, not bad for a kid from a small town outside Santa Cruz. He’s the only NJD who sounds grateful for the inspiration that comes with the James Dean comparisons. “He left a lasting impression on people because he took a lot of chances,” Christopher said. “You need to spark new things—as long as when you fall it’s on your face, you’re going forward. If you don’t find any lumps on the back of your head, you’re OK.” It’s easy to see why he was cast to play Patrick Swayze’s brother in Point Break—he looks a lot like Swayze, except cherubic. Next he’s doing “a movie called Dark Horse, with Ed Begley and Mimi Rogers. I play a supersensitive, nice, down-to-earth, unbelievably sweet guy—believe it or not, it’s a stretch to play a nice guy.”
Dana Ashbrook is the NJD who is most dazzling in person. On Twin Peaks he was so dark and brooding as Bobby you couldn’t tell that in the flesh he looks like that weird-streak English actor, Rupert Everett the Beautiful. Ashbrook arrived at the photo shoot shrouded in baggy black clothes with a black baseball cap over the Best Hair in the West, and dark glasses over the Eyes, which are so freakishly blue that all the makeup women, stylists, and photo assistants—grown women used to great looks—were left engorged, in creamed-out oblivion. If I weren’t old enough to be . . . well, I’m glad I saw him before I was too old to appreciate it.
The Twin Peaks feature film will include Ashbrook as Bobby again, but in the meantime, being one of the new breed of Hollywood kids, the twenty-four-year-old has his own production company and is trying to produce movies no one else will do. “We’re trying to make small, moralistic films,” he said, “to further universal spirituality.” He just finished a short film called The Coriolis Effect, which, he said, “is about love, infidelity, and bad weather.”
Jamie Walters, who costarred with John Travolta in Shout (and therefore went virtually unseen, such is the Travolta-loathing in the air), is the NJD who looks most like the McCoy. He’s also the least Hollywood showbiz of these guys, having moved from Boston to New York to attend NYU film school. “I got a job at the Canal Bar as a waiter and as a bartender. A customer came in and said he could get me a job doing commercials, so I went on a Levi’s audition and I got it. Then I began getting acting jobs and decided to take lessons.”
He’s the only NJD without a publicist and the only one I could actually talk to without feeling his career agenda pulsing beneath the surface. He’s not so much “on” as he is along for the ride.
“Since I’ve come to L.A.,” he said, “I’ve experienced tons of rejection and learned how to cook. Part of the fun of being in L.A. is not liking it. Not liking it builds character.” He plays Frank James on the Young Riders TV series and will assume a small part in a Cameron Crowe movie called Singles. He and Luke Perry knew each other in New York and on auditions were often mistaken for each other, though they are nothing alike. Perry has an almost Edwardian quality about him, an elegance that would wor
k in a hero from any age, whereas Walters could only have happened après James Dean. Maybe we just always want more James Deans. Especially now, when there are so many suits lying from so many podiums.
The young actors with even a Hail Mary hope of being likened to James Dean are happy, of course, to play along with our fantasy. In L.A. right now there are cubic tons of unemployed teen-idol material, all of whom believe sincerely that if they got a chance to be on a show like 90210, they’d damn well put up with any comparison and not do anything to endanger their careers. Once it actually happens, who you become moves beyond your control, which—let’s face it—is a cold shower. James Dean himself probably had no idea he was the New Frank Sinatra (or was it the New Rudolph Valentino?), but that’s where things were leading.
We need these young, beautiful men to remind us that there’s something besides the liars in suits. We need these wonderful boys to seem misunderstood. As the Rolling Stones sang, “the little girls understand.” In a mall in Florida the little girls, ten thousand strong, mobbed Luke Perry, breaking plate glass and injuring twenty-one of their number in the stampede.
James Dean was rock and roll before anyone knew it wasn’t a fad, and he was rock and roll before it was Disneyized and turned into role-model material. He was the role model for people who hated role models, and what we still want is more James Deans, and no one will ever be James Dean enough.
Even James Dean hardly was the artist long enough to live anything approaching a full life. But anytime someone slinky in a T-shirt and jeans with messy hair comes by, we’ll think he’s the latest one, and though others might think he’s nothing but a soap star with a look, or the newest fad—well, maybe one of these new James Deans will last long enough to become someone else.
Esquire
May 1992
GREAT LEGS
THE FIRST man whose legs I’ll never forget was a lifeguard in Santa Monica. It was an overcast day and no one was on the beach except him, age twenty-two, and me, a mere fourteen. He was one of those perfect, too-beautiful L.A. beachboys: blond hair, blue eyes, tan as a summer vacation and tall—over six feet, maybe six three. His legs came up to my waist, it seemed to me, and though I remember his smell—Sea & Ski—and his voice—a kind of moonglow tenor—and I remember him crushing me in his strong, tan arms in a kiss, it’s his legs that I still think about. He stood there, as I fled after the kiss, with those long, elegant legs silhouetted against the gray-blue of the painted lifeguard shack. Sad, lost romance.
I was too young to be fooling around with lifeguards, but my preference for legs was solidly in place even then. Tan legs meant perfection, and nothing else would do. Of course, no one with California- beach, lifeguard legs—except maybe Tom Selleck—has even survived those days. So it was lucky that my life, and my tastes, changed suddenly in 1964 when the Beatles and their scrawny English legs scissored across Ed Sullivan’s stage. Lifeguards were a thing of the past; Liverpool was it.
Before the Beatles, guys with legs that skinny (Henry Fonda, for instance) wore the baggiest pants they could find and hoped you wouldn’t notice. But once the Liverpool look arrived, being the skinniest guy around was a badge of honor. When you look back at photographs of the sixties, what you see are little stick legs in black suits with Cuban-heeled boots. And you just know that under those toothpick-thin trousers, the legs were ghost white. But it didn’t matter. I was such a sucker for George Harrison that how he would have looked on the beach in Santa Monica was the last thing on my mind. Scrawny was beautiful. It was in this phase of my life that I fell in love for the last time, and the man of my dreams was as skinny as George Harrison with legs like some Gothic bas-relief. But I’m still an appreciative student of men’s legs.
There are, it seems to me, three basic styles of great ones: cowboy, athletic, and my beloved scrawny rock and roll. The cowboy legs most women can’t help feeling weak in the knees about are Clint Eastwood’s in those Sergio Leone movies. They are so graceful and divine that even my grandmother, dozing before the TV, sits up the minute the flute solo comes on.
The second type—the athletic legs—have come into style more recently, since many basketball players, Olympic champions, and other scantily clad men we might never have noticed have begun to appear frequently on TV. The great tragedy of the decade is former L.A. Lakers forward Magic Johnson’s retirement. I’ll miss watching him move so effortlessly on the court, his feet slightly pigeon-toed, smiling as if to say: “What shall I do now to slaughter these guys?”
Finally, there’s the ultimate in scrawny rock and roll legs—Mick Jagger’s. Your heart goes out to him; mine does anyway. I look at the other guys, I remember my lifeguard, but I’m always willing to give a ninety-eight-pound weakling the benefit of a doubt. For the quint-essential L.A. teenager I once was, that’s a legacy of these strange times and a tribute to the power of love.
Self
May 1992
CHAIRMEN OF THE BOARD
THE STORY that serves as formative mythology and personal inspiration for all businessdude-surfers is almost certainly not true, but who cares? It’s about when Otis Chandler was still running the Los Angeles Times and was said to have these sedate business or editorial meetings during which a butler would come in carrying a note on a silver tray. Chandler would read the note, leap to his feet, apologize all around for his departure, and then run out the door. Someone would retrieve the note from the floor and read the two words written on it—SURF’S UP.
“He always surfed Dana Point—Killer Dana,” John Perenchio, a lawyer and developer, told me. “It really made him mad when they built a marina there.” Even a developer thinks development has gone too far when it wrecks somebody’s shore break.
“I try and surf a couple times a week, in the morning, six thirtyish. If you get there at five o’clock, there are already people in the water. There’s a whole yuppie emergence of surfers—lawyers, doctors. I’ve heard there’s a group called the Surfer’s Medical Association, and every year they go to Fiji for their convention, which means they surf.”
Since almost anyone connected with surfing is famous for not being connected with anyone else, it’s kind of surprising to hear that Perenchio and other surfers like him are organized into something called Heal the Bay, which is trying to clean up the water off Santa Monica. Perenchio’s also involved in the Surfrider Foundation, which is trying to clean up the water off Malibu (other places too). When normal surfers get mad about what’s happening to their water, they bitch to one another. But when businessdude-surfers get mad, they lobby.
There’s also a group called Save Our Coast and one called Environment Now, and a surfer who’s involved in both of those plus the two aforementioned organizations is Jeff Harris, MD. “One of my patients, who works with petroleum engineers, says we have the capability to make natural-gas cars, but the oil companies have all this gas-station infrastructure they don’t want to declare obsolete. Meanwhile, Mexico City is drowning in smog. It’s frustrating to rational people who know things could be better. I’m a family doctor in Malibu, and people come in all the time with ear infections and sinus infections from the polluted water. But when the surf’s good, I try and get out there several times a month.”
Malibu is filled with guys like these two, successful men in their prime earning years who jump out of bed predawn and climb into smelly wet suits to get a few rides in before work. Gavin Grazer goes, sometimes with his brother, Brian, who is director Ron Howard’s partner in Imagine Films Entertainment. Gavin is thirty-three, started surfing at eleven, did it semipro for a while, and then got into a more sensible line of work, filmmaking. He was heading to Portland, Oregon, to make a comedy documentary. “I considered bringing my board, but up there the water’s too cold and the sharks are too much. When I’m through I’ll go to Puerto Escondido, the Mexican pipeline in Oaxaca. It’s the most treacherous, gnarly wave around. But the water’s warm.” Will Karges goes, too. He’s twenty-nine and the president of the Johnnies C
afé Pizzeria chain here. Before the restaurants, “I was a surf bum,” he says, but even now, “when conditions are perfect, I play hooky.”
Some of these guys are even able to convince you that surfing helps their businesses. Matt Rapf sells real estate in Malibu—“I sell multimillion-dollar beachfront homes, and it’s perfect because I believe in it and can appreciate the lifestyle. But sometimes I’m showing houses to studio executives who want to know about square footage and I’m distracted because I see a great set of waves coming.”
Tom Hackett is also in real estate, lives in Pacific Palisades, went to school in Hawaii. He’s so busy with work that he does his surfing in the dark, between 10 p.m. and midnight. Isn’t night surfing kind of dangerous?
“Yeah,” he admitted. “But the more stress I can release by surfing, the more successful I can be at work. It’s productive for me to go surfing two hours a week. It gives me the ability to work harder.”
Maybe that’s how Otis Chandler justified ducking out of all those business meetings. Today he’s retired from the paper and is known to have taken up mountain biking with a vengeance. He moved out of his big house in San Marino into what can only be described as a highly glorified trailer on the surfing beach at Paradise Cove. He still looks like the kind of businessdude who has a butler with a silver tray, but he still has a flat stomach too.
Esquire
July 1992
PARTY AT THE BEACH
WHAT HAD I done? Here I was, flying into Miami, city of grandparents and right-wing Cuban émigrés. As I looked down at the coastline, the man next to me said, “See, there’s Miami Beach, where you’re going. It’s an island. Like Manhattan, you see? It goes against the coast. And there’s Miami Itself. They’re two different things. Entirely different. Miami Itself is a flourishing, great town. I love it. Miami Beach, why would anyone want to go there? It’s dead, it’s over, my parents used to drag me there. You get sick of Miami Beach, you call me at my hotel—I’ll take you for a drink.”
