I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  Newsweek

  January 31, 1994

  HELLO COLUMBUS

  I’VE NEVER understood the thrill of Lombard Street. To me it’s like a dumb blond—all curves, no character. For romance and history and fun—all I love about San Francisco—I head for Columbus Avenue every time. “Columbus is a passeggiata,” says my new friend Alessandro Baccari, who loves the neighborhood so much that he made a museum of it, the North Beach Museum, right on the mezzanine of EurekaBank. Passeggiata, Al explains, means a very slow walk. “It’s the kind of street where you promenade and browse and philosophize about life.”

  Columbus even stands out on the map, a great diagonal slash across the city grid, splitting square blocks into triangles. From the Cannery near Fisherman’s Wharf, it plows a border between bohemian North Beach and the marbled town houses of Russian Hill, nipping a corner off Washington Square, then plunging alongside Chinatown until it stops—stops dead—at the corner of Washington and Montgomery Streets.

  To understand why it does that, you have to know how nature shaped the city, first by gold and then by fire. Before 1848, North Beach was a beach, San Francisco was sleepy Spanish Yerba Buena, and Columbus Avenue wasn’t anything at all. In the frenzy of the gold rush, the cove was filled in, miners built shacks and saloons upon it, and Columbus became a demarcation line between the infamous Barbary Coast and the fast-growing town. Except that it wasn’t Columbus at all. It was just Montgomery Avenue then.

  Then came the Great Fire of 1906—only nonnatives call it the earthquake; the natives who survived it were much more worried about their houses burning down. The Italians, many of whom had saved their homes by spreading red-wine-soaked sheets across their roofs, were the immigrants who could rebuild the rest of the city. And they did, even though they’d endured much prejudice, and would continue to do so even after. For their brave, hard work, the city fathers renamed Montgomery Avenue after the Italian to whom they all felt indebted for being there in the first place.

  Columbus, even before it was Columbus, was the Italians’ market street, lined with simple Victorian-style two- or three-story wood-frame houses whose owners ran shops on the main floors and lived above. At the foot of it was the cannery, where fifteen hundred workers canned peaches. Now the Cannery is a shopping mall, where I started my most recent walk by buying socks patterned with watermelons. On the top floor is the Museum of the City of San Francisco, complete with newspaper headlines from 1906 declaring STARVING DOGS ARE DEVOURING SCORES OF BODIES and with remnants of Hearst’s folly, a thirteenth-century Spanish palace ceiling brought from Europe.

  From the Cannery I browsed past North Beach Leather, where at least two generations of aspiring cool people bought their first suede mini or black leather jacket. Then up the avenue’s slight rise, past the extremely high hills on my right where the San Francisco Art Institute lies, past the Gap, which began in San Francisco, past the playground’s high ivy walls that hide the fact that old men play boccie all day as always. The Italian presence in North Beach is still a major force, though the Chinese are gaining, there being more Chinese and fewer Italians in this world.

  I passed Bimbo’s, which you’d think was filled with bimbos but instead is a hip club where the latest fashion in avant-garde theater seems to be a group called the Broun Fellinis, so popular in an underground kind of way that society debs pick up art students waiting in line to get in at night and everyone in their twenties knows which Broun Fellini is which.

  *

  Urged on by visions of the Victorian pastry baseball cookies that I knew lay just beyond, I passed right by Washington Square, which isn’t a square at all (it has five sides) and has a statue of Benjamin Franklin (not Washington) but is the happy center of life in North Beach. I always think of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, because they had their wedding pictures taken outside that great Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church, even though they weren’t allowed to get married inside because the Church objects to divorce. Out front is a small park with a green lawn where elderly Chinese do tai chi on weekend mornings, enchanting a city that feels jaded about most everything else.

  On another corner is an adorable place called Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Store that probably was a cigar store but has been a luncheonette (dinnerette, too) since any of my friends can remember. My film editor friend Nancy told me, “I love sitting there. It’s just like the forties, looking out at that little park, eating great sandwiches—it’s really my favorite place in the whole city.”

  “Every place in San Francisco is like the forties, practically,” I pointed out. For to me, at least, most of San Francisco seems like a backdrop for some great World War II movie where sailors and nurses fell in love and life was pure and innocent and pretty girls wore hats, stockings, and cute little suits with trim waistlines.

  Farther along, I came to my favorite part of Columbus, the massive Italian pastry section where I first found out about cannoli. This time I met a girlfriend at the Stinking Rose, a newish garlic restaurant that isn’t bad for a tourist trap. You have to salute a place that celebrates the concept of putting garlic where its mouth is so devoutly that it even makes garlic ice cream.

  After lunch, I strolled up to City Lights Books, which is almost exactly as I remember it from the fifties, when my parents took me to San Francisco to hear Allen Ginsberg read “Howl” and the truly shocking part, for me, was that a grown man wore sandals. Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac (who at one point lived right behind, on Grant Avenue) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso and the many beatniks who came along with them—mostly from Greenwich Village, so that the Italian pastry shops and espresso bars of North Beach seemed like home—brought nightlife to this part of Columbus. They also carved a place in history for City Lights, which opened in 1953 and still probably has more alternative publications and books than there are alternative people. For now, I passed it by and walked to the avenue’s end, to the building that I think is the most adorable in the world.

  A wedding cake of a place, the Sentinel Building was one of the city’s first “sky-scrapers,” complete with elevator, and one of the few buildings that withstood the quake of 1906—even though it was still under construction at the time—because no expense had been spared in its structural design. Unfortunately, those expenses were mostly graft money, and Abraham “Boss” Ruef, who hoped to locate his offices there, was temporarily unable to finish the job because of an eight-year stay in San Quentin. He did finish it, however, and today his legacy is proudly occupied by Francis Ford Coppola, whom I hoped to catch a glimpse of if I was lucky.

  On the seventh of eight floors I found Tom Luddy, who’s a staff producer for Coppola—he worked on The Secret Garden and Wind. It was getting on to midday, and talk turned, as it naturally would, to lunch. “I often think I’ll go somewhere Italian,” Tom mused, “but if I feel I’m getting a cold, I always go to the Chinese restaurant Brandy Ho’s and order the smoked ham in garlic cloves, because it’s so powerful it can cure anything.”

  I said goodbye to Tom, but as I was waiting for the elevator on the seventh floor, Francis Coppola himself emerged and offered to take me up to his office on the eighth-floor penthouse, where the view was the best. In fact, Francis’s office is the most beautiful room in San Francisco and probably the world. “This is the one place in my entire life I’ve never let be photographed,” he said, mysteriously. All around were extraordinary inlaid-wood murals designed by Dean Tavoularis, his favorite production designer, depicting scenes from film history.

  I had last seen Coppola in the early seventies, when he was starting on Apocalypse Now. I remembered a sloppy guy in horrible khaki shirts and work pants. Now he wore a suit of brushed charcoal gray silk, with the most beautiful rose silk shirt, and he gave off this glow of good health and good cheer. Thank God for us all that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was a hit and that Zoetrope can continue and Coppola doesn’t have to move to L.A. and hustle. At least not yet, anyway.

  I spent the afternoon back a
t the Phoenix Hotel, lying around the pool with all the cute and young but surprisingly quiet rock-and-rollers who stay there—it’s my favorite hotel in San Francisco—but went that evening to Tosca, everyone’s favorite Columbus Avenue bar, which is just a block from the Zoetrope office and right across the street from City Lights Books. It was once a café and still serves “corrected” cappuccino with brandy, a throwback to Prohibition days. It has walls the warm brown shade of a Leonardo da Vinci drawing and one of those great long bars you see from days gone by.

  Jeannette Etheredge, the owner, agreed to talk to me even though all I did was introduce myself and say I was a friend of Tom Luddy’s. The walls, she said, “got like this through years of smoke. They used to be white in 1919 when it opened, and so were the lampshades on the chandeliers. Now the walls are dark, and the shades have turned dark red. Nothing has been changed—it’s all exactly like it was.”

  Thirteen years ago, when the original owners of Tosca decided to close the place, Etheredge bought it with the express intention of keeping it just as it was. She even kept the jukebox exactly the same. “Everyone on that jukebox is dead except Frank Sinatra,” she pointed out. Then she took me into her private office off the bar and showed me the photographs of her with Lauren Hutton, Sam Shepard, Dennis Quaid, Matt Dillon, Ginger Rogers, and Nicolas Cage. Many stars come here still; the bar was even used for a scene in Basic Instinct.

  Outside, the passeggiata was in full swing—people talking, kissing, ambling along, dropping in at the Italian pastry shops for after-dinner slides into creamy bliss. Here, it seemed to me, was the essential San Francisco: a city of lights, a city of radiant beings, a city of taxis and tourists and back alleys, a city of crazily shaped enterprises, of too-high hills and too much romance from long ago, where the past and the present blur into each other, so that whatever happened once might happen again if you could turn the right corner and find the right little entrance at just the right time.

  Chances were you’d find it somewhere on Columbus.

  Condé Nast Traveler

  April 1994

  NICOLAS CAGE

  IT WAS one of those gray days, as gray as the blue-gray of his eyes, in fact, which made it too cold for us to sit out on his beach patio and talk. So when I arrived he was standing there, beside his ’67 Corvette Sting Ray, the kind of automobile that could only belong to a guy who was once a kid raised, so romantically, in Southern California, projecting in its metallic sleekness an image of the boy no girl could say no to.

  “We’ll take my car,” he said. “And go somewhere, OK?”

  “Great,” I said, having grown up in this town, too, and knowing what cars like this meant—the allure of flying along the coast, so seductive to those raised in a place where cars were everything fun in life. And fun was everything.

  “I used to have a boyfriend with this car,” I said. “He got up to 140 miles an hour on the Pacific Coast Highway, but we were passed. Totally dusted.”

  “By what?” he asked.

  “A Cadillac,” I said. “The guy driving was older and his wife had blue hair.”

  “Never underestimate those,” he said.

  “Old guys?”

  “No,” he said, “Cadillacs.”

  With that he slid in beside me, having opened the door and made sure the belt of my sweater was inside, and off we purred. “I have to drive this real slow at first,” he said. “I haven’t been home for three months.”

  His pace was sedate; he was almost polite to his car, just as he was polite to me. There’s something almost cautious about Nick Cage in person, which I didn’t expect from a man who pounced that way on Cher in Moonstruck. There’s something almost plodding, which comes out in his voice—one that has the insistent hesitancy of James Stewart—a lack of slickness, in fact, which is the opposite of the Corvette and everything I always thought it stood for.

  In the list of his movies, from Valley Girl, where he began as the eccentric outsider who wins the girl by lack of slickness, to Birdy, where he was the sad friend, to his latest, It Could Happen to You, Nicolas Cage has managed to go from sweet to crazy, from sane to wild, from serious to madly funny, from eccentric to as clean-cut as apple pie. And he’s done it in a way that is so totally real that he’s never boring.

  A couple of nights ago I was at a Beverly Hills dinner where someone said, “I think he’s just the greatest actor, but is he a star enough for the malls?” He seems not to want that “star” kind of career, the kind where you can make one movie a year, always as the same person.

  Recently I saw his two latest movies: Red Rock West, a film noir thriller that has already become a cult classic, in which he plays a loner trapped in a web of lies, violence, and danger, and a totally mainstream romance, It Could Happen to You, in which he plays what he called the nicest guy in the world. And, because that’s who he’s supposed to be, he is. He even looks years younger, and I remarked on it.

  “Yeah, I was working out every day,” he said, “and really taking good care of myself. Thanks.”

  We pulled into the Malibu Inn, this great old, traditional diner, and he said, “Is this OK?”

  I had this sudden panicky feeling that he might prove to be one of the many L.A. actors I know who cannot go to even the most mundane of restaurants without ordering food that wasn’t on the menu, or food fixed some exotic way that the people who worked in the kitchen would have to rethink life as they knew it in order to prepare. I also had a premonition that Nick Cage might prove to be one of those actors who cannot go anyplace where waitresses work without flirting with them, especially if they were cute and young.

  But the real Nick Cage opened my car door for me, led us through the front door of the restaurant, and got to our booth without a single waitress incident. Once settled, he ordered oatmeal and strawberries, and he put the strawberries on top of the oatmeal like a normal person. Not only was he not the Cage you might have expected, he didn’t even seem like an actor to me, though from a very young age he was determined to be one, from the moment in the seventh grade that he saw James Dean in East of Eden. Particularly that scene where Dean gives the money to his father, his father rejects it, and Dean cries—the moment that Cage realized that no other job was possible.

  He was born Nicolas Coppola—the son of Francis’s brother, August Coppola, a college professor—in Long Beach, California, and lived there during his childhood. His mother, Joy Vogelsang, was a dancer/choreographer. From the time he was six, “she was ill,” he said. “She was very fragile. She suffered from severe depression. She had to go away for many years at a time; she would come in and out. But she was also a very highly tuned, sensitive person, mentally capable of extraordinary expressions and words that evoked a kind of poetry, in the way she would talk. That’s the best way I can look at it, but she’s fine now.”

  Nevertheless, he thought Long Beach was a great place to grow up. “I loved my childhood; things were so vibrant then.

  “My first six years, my formative years of life, were from ’64 to ’70. The Beatles have always been earmarks to chapters in my life. I remember I was driving in a car with Francis [Coppola] and his family, and I must have been quite young. He was listening to ‘Baby, You’re a Rich Man,’ and the words ‘How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people’ came on, and I was thinking, ‘Yeah, he really deserves to listen to this, doesn’t he?’ He was right at the height of Godfather II, and I vowed to myself that one day I’d be able to listen to that song, too, as a reward to myself. And it wasn’t until Valley Girl came out and people liked it that I felt I deserved it.”

  He remembered, “I used to make people laugh, just naturally—that was my means of expression. That’s how I made friends, by being funny. Then I discovered Elia Kazan movies, and that scene with James Dean, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do, and I didn’t want to be funny. I refused to be funny, to make my friends laugh. I started to be serious, and used that many, many years in my work.”

  H
is father then moved the family to Beverly Hills and Nick went to Beverly High, where the highly regarded drama teacher, John Ingle, put on musicals. Nick was in one, Oklahoma!, but he hated the school and quit when he couldn’t get into West Side Story.

  “When you say Beverly Hills High School, no matter how you say it, it sounds obnoxious,” he said. “You can’t really complain about Beverly Hills High because everyone’s going to read it and go, ‘Oh, poor you,’ 91240, or whatever that show is. But I’m being completely sincere. I did not grow up with money; my father was a teacher—money didn’t come easily for him. What I did experience was a kind of strange frustration when I found I could not get girls to go out with me on the bus. And I didn’t have a car. No girl would go out with me.”

  I mentioned that his original problem of getting girls at Beverly High now seems to have been more than alleviated, and he backed way up and said, “Listen, I know I’ve said in the past that I became an actor to meet girls, and I did. But now I’m thirty years old and I’m interested in the work—I’m really interested in it. It gets me out of bed, it keeps me going. I need the work.”

  Nick went straight from Beverly High into the work world. While his name was still Nicolas Coppola, he landed a pilot for a sitcom with Crispin Glover called The Best of Times. “My dear friend Crispin would hate it if I mention that job, because it was not good. It didn’t get picked up, thank heaven.”

  Then he read for the Judge Reinhold role in Fast Times at Ridgemont High but only got a small part, which was nearly cut out. At that point he decided to change his name to Nicolas Cage, and under this name he read for director Martha Coolidge (who later told him that if she’d known he was Francis’s nephew it would have colored her perception of him). “It was my very first audition under that name, and I got the job just like that.” The job was Valley Girl. He was only seventeen.

  There are two other directors he’s eager to work with: David Cronenberg and Martin Scorsese. “I met David Cronenberg and he’s a very nice man, really passionate about insects. I share his fascination. I told him about eating that cockroach in Vampire’s Kiss and it bothered him, not because it was disgusting but because I killed a cockroach.”