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I Used to Be Charming

Page 28

by Eve Babitz


  We walked three blocks to the Warsaw. It was eleven thirty, and when Kenny called in from the front, we were invited upstairs to meet the owner.

  The Warsaw was as much of an excuse for a Den of Iniquity as Miami Beach could muster. In L.A. today there are places where people with pierced genitals do weird things on stage with chains and thongs, but for Miami Beach the Warsaw was as modern as could be. It was entirely black inside, flat black, with strobes and the loudest music man has ever known, music that became the bodies of the big dancing men and the small dancing women. Although the place looked entirely too crowded to me, Kenny apologized for its being so empty and for my not being able to see it on a more typical night.

  We made our way up narrow side stairs to a mezzanine, from which we had a closer view of an enormous dark-red broken heart about eight feet in diameter, hanging over the dance floor. To me, it seemed the real heart of South Beach, broken because AIDS has killed so many gay men and because those who were left had come here from New York or L.A. or San Francisco to spend their days in the soothing sun and their nights dancing here at the Warsaw to forget. It was they who had created this wonderful scene, in spite of the sadness, the tragedy, and the hearts broken by so many, many funerals.

  We stood watching for a while, and then Kenny led me down a black hallway. He opened a door at the end, and we found ourselves in this office with Louis Canales, the man responsible for talking everyone in New York into coming to Miami Beach. Louis calls himself a promoter but is much too soft-spoken and casually dressed to be anyone’s idea of that word. With him was George Nuñez, the Warsaw’s owner. Both had liquid brown eyes and no tan and looked to be in their late thirties, languid and sweet.

  “Hi,” Louis said to me. We’d met once before, at a dinner on Lincoln Road. He took my hand, kissed it, and said, “I hear you’re the fiercest person on the beach.”

  “You’ve been to the Alexander, haven’t you?” George asked. He’d noticed that Kenny had a jacket on, which meant he was dressed up, which meant the Alexander, where in fact we had made a stop early that evening. In this scene, I’d learned, everyone knows where everyone is going or has been by what they’re wearing.

  “What I love about Miami,” Kenny said, “is that if you want to get dressed up, you only have to put on a jacket.”

  “I know,” George said. “When I lived in New York and was in the jewelry business, I had all these suits. But now I don’t even have trousers. Just jeans.”

  By now, everybody knew Madonna was in Miami Beach to shoot that book of sexy pictures and that she was looking for a house. (She bought one, but in Coconut Grove.) Louis Canales had spent all day with her, but nobody said anything, and since Louis always looked tired and adorable, he didn’t look any the worse for wear.

  It was midnight by the time we got over to the Deuce. The place was packed with a mixed jam. Kenny and I sat at the bar, which was curved so you could look at people across from you. You didn’t have to strain, in other words, to get a load of the drag queens. On the walls were mirrors, and above the mirrors on the back wall was this neon reclining woman that the TV producer Michael Mann had given to the bar after using it as a prop in a scene from Miami Vice. The Deuce smelled like all the gin mills in all the casbahs in every town from Fairbanks to Tierra del Fuego, but the people were more beautiful.

  Usually, in real life if I have to stay up past eleven o’clock, I complain, but by one in the morning I was so caught up in wondering who would come in next and what they’d be wearing that I didn’t want to leave. “Oh,” Glenn Albin said when I told him the next day how I hadn’t wanted to leave, “you were what we call here ‘into the Deuce.’ ”

  Thank goodness I was only drinking Diet Coke, because the next day I got the message that Chris Blackwell wanted to see me.

  •

  I’d been curious about Blackwell ever since my old rock and roll days, when I’d been an album-cover designer-slash-groupie—and I do mean “slash”—for Denny Cordell, who owned Shelter Records, and all the girls spoke of Chris Blackwell in the most hushed terms. They’d say, “Well, Denny is cute, but Chris is just so elegant and beautiful and . . . charming.”

  By then, Blackwell was already a legend, having started Island Records out of a small office in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1962 to bring local talents like Laurel Aitken (“Little Sheila”) and Millie (“My Boy Lollipop”) to American and British audiences. He had discovered and signed the Spencer Davis Group, with its fifteen-year-old singer Stevie Winwood, and when Winwood had gone on to form Traffic, Blackwell had produced that group as well. Jethro Tull, Cat Stevens, King Crimson—Blackwell had done them all, then almost single-handedly popularized reggae, making stars in the process of Bob Marley and the Wailers, Toots and the Maytals, Burning Spear, and more. Along the way, he grew as renowned for his loyalty as for his instincts. He nurtured bands until they clicked—most famously U2 in the early eighties, when no one else would touch them.

  Although today Chris Blackwell doesn’t have as much money as, say, God, he probably has more than you or I do (unless you’re Ahmet Ertegun or David Geffen). Grown men despair when they think about him, especially men in rock and roll, like my old boyfriend in Miami. “I heard he sold Island to PolyGram for four hundred million dollars, and he’s still managing the record company,” my poor friend moaned. “And even if he had to give back loads to banks and lawyers, he still must really be rolling in it.”

  What he’s done with it is to expand: first into distributing movies (Mona Lisa, The Trip to Bountiful, Kiss of the Spider Woman) and now into real estate in a very big way right here in Miami Beach. His Island Trading Company has not only bought and refurbished the Marlin, it’s done the Netherland and may soon do the Tides. Almost every day I heard rumors that he was buying up more. It was like a game of Monopoly where you’ve got nothing left but the utilities and a bunch of mortgaged railroads and your friend has all the money, has hotels on all the yellows and greens, and is about to build on Park Place and Boardwalk.

  The odd thing for me about meeting Blackwell at last was that I hadn’t asked to see him. He’d asked to see me. Someone must have told him that I was hanging around the Marlin, because the next thing I knew there was a message at the Raleigh from his assistant, saying that Blackwell would see me at one o’clock in the afternoon, at the Marlin, in the Shabeen café.

  Considering this was the day of his party, that seemed to be cutting it pretty close. I entered the Marlin a few minutes early, and there was this manager, Wendy, who had fluffy brown hair, a New York pallor, and a worried attitude. “I know he really wants to meet you,” she said, “because you’re his first appointment.”

  •

  By the time Blackwell arrived, at one thirty, both Wendy and I were nervous wrecks (he’s famous for getting distracted, showing up eight hours or three days late for appointments). But soon enough, his famous charm—and a beautiful smile that made him look like Kirk Douglas in a pirate movie—mesmerized and calmed us. What I noticed right after the smile were these wonderful blue eyes and this not-too-long, but still rock and roll, Irishly blond-red hair. He had on a black T-shirt, black pants, and some kind of shoes so anonymous I don’t remember them—maybe just sandals.

  “What,” I asked, “can I do for you?”

  He looked—if he could have looked that way—to be momentarily at a loss for words. I mean, you don’t often have people from the press throwing in the towel so early.

  It felt good to throw him off guard, but I immediately felt guilty and asked a straight question. “So,” I said, “I heard that you bought this because you came down to Miami Beach three years ago and didn’t want to stay at the Fontainebleau.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I was supposed to stay in one of those places, but I changed to some place nearer here. When all the developers fell through, I came back about a year later and all that was here was crack users and elderly couples. I thought it was so great that I looked around for something I could afford.
And this I could afford. I couldn’t afford anything on the ocean. Things on Ocean were three times as much, so I bought this.”

  His accent was upper-class British, toned down by this sense of not wanting to intimidate people. And there was a gleam behind him, a hidden agenda that promised that if things were different, he’d be perfectly happy to forget all this and just have fun.

  “I think there are some people who capture the imagination of their generation,” I gushed, “and you’re one of them.”

  “Which generation is that?” he asked, and began laughing this mad Irish laugh that cut across decades and pompous remarks like mine.

  “A blurry generation,” I offered.

  “The sixties to the nineties.” He laughed, and so did I. “I must say I was thinking about that the other day, and I feel very lucky I was in England at that time. You know, someone was asking me if there was any other time that reminded me of this here in Miami now, and I said, ‘Yes, London in the sixties.’ It was great then, and it’s great here now.”

  One thing that wasn’t on his bio was the fact that he’s a part owner of this extremely low-down (lascivious almost) fast-food chain in L.A. called Fatburger, which is so infamously great that you see rock stars’ long limos parked outside the one on La Cienega in east Beverly Hills and chauffeurs sent inside to load up on this thing they invented, or perfected, called chili fries—i.e., the best and greasiest french fries, with chili (gummy, horrible, bad for you) ladled on top.

  No human being is constitutionally able to lead a life of eating chili fries. They’ll kill you. In fact, pretty soon L.A. is going to have a Chili Fries Anonymous.

  “I’ve heard you own Fatburger,” I said. “You should be ashamed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re so bad for you,” I said. “It’s a lot like drugs, those chili fries there—really bad for you.”

  “But they’re so great!” he exclaimed.

  “The only thing good about them,” I said, “is they make you happy.”

  “Well,” he said, laughing, “that’s a start, isn’t it?”

  Finally I could see he was getting that look that busy men get, and so I said I’d better let him go. He asked if I was coming to the party that night, and I said, “I was going to go with this rock and roll guy who lives in Miami, but both of his ex-wives are coming, and now he’s chicken.”

  “Tell him he’ll have fun,” he said.

  “That’s not his idea of fun,” I replied.

  “Well, anyway, you’ll come, won’t you?”

  He gave me one of these great blue-eyed looks, and I said to myself, Not only me but a dress to die for.

  •

  I had two choices. I could go along with the high-command dress code decreed by Louis Canales, who said “just casual.” Or I could wear this Donna Karan clinging thing with a zipper down the front—red, which now that I was so tan nearly made me glow in the dark. I decided that since I had the red dress, it should be worn.

  At eight thirty, as arranged, I came into the lobby to meet Kenny and saw that he had sensibly decided to wear what he already had on—white jeans and a T-shirt. When he saw me, though, he added a vest.

  At Kenny’s request, we went first to some book party on Washington, where I saw all the people I’d gotten to know in my two weeks in town. But when it was time to leave, I spotted Kenny, up to his ears in some conversation with Bruce Weber, the—ahem—photographer of cheekbones and cheeks.

  “You go on,” Kenny said. “I’ll meet you there.”

  “OK,” I said, and so off I went. A typical Miami Beach “we’ll catch up with you later” parting.

  Five of us wandered through the jasmine night. The moon was almost full, the potential unlimited.

  Until, that is, we got within a block of the party. Chaos! There were cops, barricades, searchlights. Hundreds of people waving invitations were trying to catch Louis’s eye, while he tried to accommodate what turned out to be three thousand people in a room that held six hundred (and that many only if you counted the vacant lot next to the Marlin, where one of Blackwell’s bands was playing and people were supposed to dance).

  If I’d been by myself, I’d have gone straight home, but I was with new friends whose idea of a challenging situation was just this. One of them managed to catch Louis’s attention with a perfect East Coast money voice, and Louis managed to let us crawl through, and I wound up with this thing I still have, a large necklace that says MARLIN—BACKSTAGE PASS.

  The lobby was a crush, the bar was a crush, and nobody wanted to be outside dancing. They all wanted to be right there in case Madonna came. Everyone knew Madonna had flown into town the day before; everyone knew that Isabella Rossellini had also flown in; and Grace Jones, too—and everyone wanted to be there to see if she danced topless on a table. I found myself on a balcony, where I could stand above the crowd and look down on great arms, great legs, gorgeous girls, beautiful boys—everyone trying just to get a drink, food having long disappeared. In their midst stood Chris Blackwell, looking gorgeous.

  It was like the restaurant Evelyn Waugh described that everyone went to after a car race, “where only the overbearing and obnoxious could get tables, and only the vile and outrageous could get served.”

  Not that anyone could get served.

  Much less out, as I discovered when I tried to leave after about fifteen minutes.

  Later, I heard that the “real party,” the one with Madonna and Isabella Rossellini and the VIPs, had been upstairs on the roof. The person who told me this then said that he was kidding, but I didn’t believe that. If I were Chris Blackwell and my friends were all in town and I wanted to spare them, I would put them on the roof too.

  Especially if I wanted them to be able to get a drink.

  Or an hors d’oeuvre.

  Now all parties in Miami Beach, my friend Glenn Albin told me, are judged by the Marlin standard. “Since that party,” he said, “everyone has started dressing up. Before, they’d just go out in their usual clothes, but now, ever since the Marlin, we’ve noticed that if there’s a party, people wear clothes.”

  So much for Chris Blackwell’s coming to Miami Beach because it was easy and casual.

  •

  Still, all I needed were mornings like the one I woke up to the next day—the sky clear, the water blue, the Pinta, Niña, and Santa María out in the distance—because a calm day is all the casualness I need. I gingerly strolled past the Marlin to see if it had survived the previous night. Not a lavender umbrella was out of place. Had the party been just one more mirage?

  What I loved about Miami Beach, I decided as I packed to leave, was that what it wanted to be was something to look forward to—a mirage unrealized, a half-finished vision. And I loved the water, water everywhere that was so blue and so tropical and so clean and so seductive, and the people with boats launched from their backyards, great boats and rowboats and even canoes. The whole of Miami is a city rising out of water, reflected in water, shimmering in water, mingled in water. Alongside it lies Miami Beach, like one of those cruise liners that suddenly shudders into view, huge and festive, the brass of dance-band music wafting over the water. Except that it is such an old and weather-beaten ship—a ghost ship, almost—its pastels worn by the sun and by sea-spray air, moored to the mainland by its bridges, its vow to return about to be remembered.

  “What I love about this place,” Chris Blackwell said, “is that it’s so sexy. I mean, it is, isn’t it?”

  “What I really love,” Kenny Zarrilli said, driving me to the airport the afternoon I, sadly, had to leave, “is that the airport’s only twelve minutes from the hotel. I love getting into Miami at six thirty in the morning and suddenly feeling that air. The tropics! You get off the plane, and suddenly you’re here.”

  He hugged me goodbye and said, “You’ll be back. We’ll have a party for the pool.”

  Two weeks before, the idea of flying across the country to celebrate the finishing of someone’s s
wimming pool would have struck me as monumentally ridiculous. Now it seemed like a perfectly sensible excuse.

  A tropical city in blue water with pearly air. It turned out I was right about my hair—it couldn’t be too blond. And Jeanette was right about Miami—if you can’t get in the mood in Miami, you can’t get in the mood at all.

  Condé Nast Traveler

  August 1992

  HIPPIE HEAVEN

  THE SIXTIES were a dance that began because everyone was so sick of the uptight fifties, they just went hog wild, and then wilder and wilder. One English boyfriend of mine in those days told me about a party in Washington, DC, where a young girl dressed as a mime/ princess went around blessing all the guests with a lily as she was about to leave. When she got to the last man in the room, a large executive filled with Scotch, and was about to touch him with her flower, his eyes began to bulge and his throat grew taut, and he snarled: “You don’t scare me!”

  But she did. That was the point.

  He knew exactly what a girl like her meant.

  Maybe the reason some of us so long for the sixties to come back is because the world has gone so seriously dismal, it makes the sixties look like they had character—flaky or not. After the eighties, if you begin wearing long fringe, suede hip-hugger bell-bottoms, and boots, you’re no longer some “material girl,” but someone intent on more important, higher, spiritual things—the rain forest, jobs with heart, recycling.

  Of course, we know that the minute you throw away a long-treasured costume because it’ll never come back, it comes back. Knowing this, I never did throw my sixties things away because for one thing I still wore them anyway, even when they were grossly out of style, and for another, to me they were art. Especially the red rayon forties dress, cut on the bias, that I’d worn the nights I waited in the Troubadour bar in West Hollywood, looking for trouble like Jim Morrison. Or my navy wide-leg sailor pants with the thirteen-button front (giving sailors thirteen chances to change their minds, was the idea—not that I ever did). These were the original bell-bottoms and not the Cher cut that came later, when the waistbands hit the hips and looking like a hula dancer became of the essence. I still have those pants, and I’ve worn them since 1967 when I bought them in an army surplus store. I look elegant in them and people have asked me if they’re Chanel, they’re so classic and well cut.

 

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