I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  About Scorsese he said, “I met him, too. He was very gracious. I was nervous because I’m such an admirer, and he struck me as being just passionate about film. I found it invigorating. I could listen to him talk forever; he’s just so pure.”

  There was a time not long ago when he had become “so selective about movie roles that I found that I hadn’t done anything in two years. And basically an actor is only an actor when he’s acting.” And an actor who isn’t working is also forced to amuse himself by breaking girls’ hearts, getting nailed in tabloids, or being seen at midnight in a red convertible with the top down, rock and roll blaring, or at the Westwood Hamburger Hamlet with Charlie Sheen, a white limo outside, the two of them in the bar together the way men will do. “God, he was so obnoxious,” a friend of mine who saw him said. “Can you believe it? Looking for girls right on Fairfax at midnight!”

  “Well, did he get girls?” I asked. (It sounded like a sensible idea to me. Fun, even.)

  “Yes, but,” she huffily sneered, “I mean, really, how obvious can you get!”

  Today he has a model girlfriend, who lives in L.A., and a three-year-old-son, Weston Coppola Cage, by ex-girlfriend Christina Fulton, with whom he shares custody. “Until I had a child, I was consumed with myself, consumed with the work; it was all about me. Now a day doesn’t go by that I’m not thinking about my son and worrying. I do think I worry too much.”

  He arrived yesterday from Canada, where he spent three months shooting Trapped in Paradise, directed by George Gallo for Fox and costarring Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz. He was in town for only a day and a half, to visit his son before flying to New York. “I’m going to be in this movie Kiss of Death with David Caruso. I play the old Richard Widmark part, the killer. I’m supposed to be King Kong big, with a goatee, in two weeks. It’s directed by Barbet Schroeder, whom I’ve wanted to work with ever since I saw Barfly.”

  He was still lithe and boyish from the movie he’d just done, but I’m sure, being the real Nick Cage, he’ll really be a killer in two weeks.

  I checked my tape recorder to make sure I’d gotten everything. Nick mentioned once in the midst of all this that mechanical things all break around him—answering machines, cars—“It’s a curse, a genuine affliction; I’m not kidding.”

  And so we left, going once more outside where he stood beside me to open my door, this very cautious, polite, serious, intelligent man with a bad-boy car and a beautiful voice; the gray-blue day behind him seemed now to come from the color of his eyes—so sad, blue, and quiet.

  “Well,” he said, “this has really been fun.” I was relieved. Fun was always the criteria where we grew up, the object of desire.

  We got into the car and he drove us back up the coast, where I said goodbye and that it had been fun meeting him, too.

  Harper’s Bazaar

  July 1994

  GIRL’S TOWN

  I LOVE other cities—I do. Whenever I go to San Francisco or New York, I wonder what I’m doing in the land of smoggy freeways, earthquakes, fires, and floods. Still, when I get back to L.A. I’m always glad. Nowhere else is it possible to pass for cute long after the point where you’re obliged to conduct yourself like the matronly age you are. If you don’t, people will accuse you of not having good taste—of being too L.A. for words.

  I mean, only in L.A. can you be Cher, all in black leather riding a Harley down the Pacific Coast Highway. Let’s face it, if she were in New York, she’d have to be attending those loathsome Upper East Side dinner parties or charity balls to meet cute guys, and except for John Kennedy Jr., there isn’t that much of a selection. Because in New York—or worse yet, the rest of the country—women who aren’t girls are supposed to look, well, no fun at all, that’s for sure. They’re supposed to dress in classical attire befitting their social station. Even when casual, they’ve all got the same hair—almost shoulder length and held back by a barrette—the same loafers, the same white jeans, the same pastel cashmere sweaters. Cher, in other words, they’re not. They eschew tattoos with a vengeance. Nor do they have Cher’s appetite for guys her own age: twenty- four.

  In L.A., it’s so much easier to look healthy, because here nobody looks askance at you for running around in gym clothes. In fact, for some of us, gym clothes are all we’ll wear. In fact, there’s something fabulous about these great new running bras—you can look very sexy and like you don’t care. I used to feel I had to apologize for everyone here using their skin and Lycra as outerwear. Eventually, I realized it’s what I love about L.A.—it keeps juices coursing and interest high. If you don’t want to think about such things, you should stay home or move to Seattle.

  Ever since L.A. was invented, there has been a great battle between those who thought women should behave like they do in other places and women who didn’t think about it because they were too busy working, being in love, and not caring how they looked but rather how they felt.

  From the very beginning, women coming here found that even the lowest-paid waitress was breathing the same balmy air as the richest socialite. The weather was democracy itself, and though the first women running things were the same as everywhere else, they were forgotten when the second generation began running things—women like Mary Pickford, who by the age of twenty-six, in 1919, formed her own movie company with Douglas Fairbanks, D.W. Griffith, and Charlie Chaplin. They called it United Artists so the artists could get the money.

  Pickford also sold herself as “America’s sweetheart”—a nice girl content to stay home and be cute, when in reality, she was a rabid worker who had been supporting her family since she was five and known as Baby Gladys in a vaudeville act.

  Unlike the rest of the world, Los Angeles was a place where girls could be inspired by the feeling that even if they didn’t wind up in a castle like Pickfair—visited by kings and queens—they were part of this same air. Even when the air turned to smog, it was still untainted by a socially stifling mind-set that insisted talented girls belonged in the demimonde—never the monde itself.

  Historically, “townie,” or working-class, women could never get anywhere by doing anything, with the sole exception of Joan of Arc, and we all know what happened to that girl. Until Los Angeles, where women not only captured people’s imaginations as stars but also wrote movies, were editors, and otherwise jumped into full-time, highly paid, marvelous occupations that required brains and fast minds but no social connections.

  Anita Loos went to work for D.W. Griffith; June Mathis, an influential figure at Metro and a writer, too, discovered Valentino. By the 1930s, smart women who weren’t even that cute could get as great a job as a star like Judy Garland.

  Hollywood, which was a geographical location in L.A., became a mythological state. Here, for the first time in the world, was a gold rush that wasn’t just for men, a land grab available to the lowest of the low, a place where nonvoting dish mops could become golden icons like Greta Garbo, Mae West, or even Penny Marshall.

  If you hated L.A., like Garbo, you could take your money and hide in New York, and nobody out here minded or accused you of bad taste or disloyalty. If you loved L.A. but were lazy, you could rest on your laurels, like Mae West, and cultivate musclemen. Nowadays, you can live overlooking the city, like Marshall, wearing only a sarong, on the phone to the hottest stars extant, all trying to get her to direct them in whatever she’s doing next.

  Los Angeles has always been a great place for women in sarongs, in harem pants, in shorts, in dance togs—barefoot and breathing the same soft, free air.

  For other women, the place is impenetrable. I once heard an Upper East Side matron trying to explain why she’ll never come to California now that Swifty Lazar isn’t here anymore to have parties. “I don’t know anyone there,” she said. “Why would I go?”

  “Los Angeles,” the man next to me said, “is a cold shower to women like her.”

  To women like her maybe it is, but to women like me, like Pickford, Garbo, West, and Marshall, it’s the rest of the wo
rld that’s cold. Los Angeles for us is that warm night when the scent of jasmine, orange blossoms, and love inspires us to become who and what we want to be. Because here it has been done, it’s part of the history of our century.

  And in spite of quakes, floods, fires, and traffic, the cold showers here are never as bad as winters in other towns, where you sell your soul to survive, where wearing the right clothes, marrying the right man, and having good taste are everything. Where the worst thing you can be is “too L.A.”

  Los Angeles

  July 4, 1994

  THE MANSON MURDERS

  I WAS IN the bath when the phone rang in the Spanish duplex where I lived alone in the heart of West Hollywood, surrounded by hippies, rock stars, dealers, and others who clung to dreams of making it—or at least of never having to return home to Arizona or Seattle or wherever. They lived there and thought that perhaps they might someday be invited to Cielo Drive, to be under the night skies with the peacocks.

  I was standing naked and dripping in the hallway, listening to my old boyfriend Peter say, with a note of “get ready” in his voice, “Did you hear the news?”

  “News? What news?”

  We were all enchanted, under a spell of peace and love and LSD that we thought had changed the world. In those days, people might drop by for one joint, get hung up on some transformational conversation, and wind up staying for the whole day or three weeks and then leaving for different skies, other adventures. And it was going to last forever.

  We were all under the same spell, but still I had always been paranoid in the worst and most obnoxious way, afraid not only of the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Department but also of “joy”—of “scenes,” of the hints of orgies, of too much happening on drugs, of girls who lost their heads. I knew people like that, their minds wiped clean by some acid/speed combination that left them standing rigid with tears streaming down their faces, and I was afraid of being one of them, dropped off at the UCLA psychiatric clinic.

  I couldn’t smoke a joint without hearing the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Department kicking down the door. I couldn’t be high without knowing that cops five miles away could tell and were coming to bust me. Everyone said, “Well, try LSD, you can’t be paranoid on that!” But I was.

  Still on the phone, I ran to my front door and locked it. “Why would anyone do that to Sharon Tate?” I asked.

  I had seen Sharon Tate only once, in Rome in 1961 at the Café de Paris, a vision of such loveliness, and yet somehow this incredible gift hadn’t protected her—nothing had protected any of them. My friend M., a tailor who made suede clothes for Sharon and Roman Polanski, had been up to their house on Cielo Drive with her husband, and she said, “Some weird kind of evil flirtation stuff was going on between them and us. My husband was necking with Sharon, so I never wanted to go back up there again.”

  We all heard the rumors, of European movie types picking up hitchhikers, tying them up, filming them—whips, sodomy, and strange young girls who’d go along with anything just to be there. Into this vacuum of freedom, an ex-convict named Charlie had wandered and worked out a system where he would be God, a star, and if that didn’t work, then . . . there was always plan B.

  After the killings, Roman Polanski, who knew a thing or two about wickedness, said, “If I’m looking for a motive, I’d look for something that doesn’t fit your habitual standard—something much more far-out.”

  It took a short time for the police to figure out what had happened (murderous guru’s hippie disciples take their killing spree to throats and bellies of the beautiful people of Cielo Drive), and during that period a woman named Catherine, with whom I’d gone to grammar school, joined the Manson group. When he was on trial, she and some other followers etched crosses in their foreheads and then crawled down Sunset Boulevard toward downtown, where Charlie’s trial was taking place. I was walking to the store for my morning cookies and coffee when I looked down and saw Cathy, but I figured giving her a cookie wasn’t the point.

  As we were learning about Manson, going out at night in your car became, for women, a scary adventure. Once those pictures of him and his family started appearing on the front pages, hitchhikers could no longer depend on people as they had in the luxurious days of free everything.

  My friend Sandra Sharpe told me, “One night, I was up in the hills on this winding and deserted road, rounding a bend, when this guy jumped out from behind a bush, waving a flag. And I just freaked. And then two more guys with headbands waving rags jumped out and yelled at me, and I put my foot on the gas really hard, went around the curve, and drove straight into a movie being filmed. I practically crashed into the buffet!”

  The enchantment had fled in the night. The charm had broken; we had heard the screams, and they were ours.

  Esquire

  August 1994

  JACKIE’S KIDS

  TABLE 7, that’s Jackie Collins’ station at Le Dôme, the Sunset Strip restaurant that was once a powerful lunch spot but seemed, the day I entered, to be slacking off—although maybe it was because O. J. Simpson had just been declared a “fugitive” and anyone powerful who would normally be going out for lunch didn’t. Except us, that is. Not only was I there, I was incorrigibly early as usual. So early that I sat in my car for fifteen minutes, trying at least to be merely on time, only to find when I entered the restaurant that Jackie Collins was not only already there but she had bought a copy of one of my books and was waiting for me. “I’m such a fan of your work,” she said in one of those English voices that wraps around you with cozy welcome and simultaneously promises more spine-tingling lowdown than even her books deliver. “I can see you’re like me—we both like to observe, but we like to be involved at the same time.” “Great table,” I said, noticing its strategic location. I had never met Collins before. On book jackets, she looks assembled by teams of stylists and lighting artists; in real life, she looked like she sounded: friendly with an edge of worldliness. With her warm brown eyes, tousled brown hair, black Armani jacket, black boots, and black leggings, she could have been an elegant beatnik—a sexy but dolled-down, more human version of her sister, Joan. Her hands fiddled with a clutch of clunky silver objects hanging almost to her waist. “It’s a designer called Robert Lee Morris, who has a shop in SoHo I love,” she said. “I don’t smoke, so I have to hold onto something. These are lucky, they’re fun and they’re phallic.” I found myself feeling not so much that I was with some invented superstar like the ones on her book covers but rather with a sort of glamorous bohemian with a very low-down streak that causes incredibly dirty thoughts to come bubbling up uncontrollably and which, on paper, sells millions and millions of copies.

  More than 120 million copies worldwide, in fact, and published in thirty-two languages, starting in 1969, when her first, fabulously scandalous The World Is Full of Married Men debuted in England; moving on to her first gigantic American hit, Hollywood Wives, which came out just in time for the eighties; through her Lucky Santangelo trilogy (Chances, Lucky, and Lady Boss); past her books Rock Star and Hollywood Husbands. “I get this table because I like to see what’s going on,” she said. “But when I’m working, I don’t go out too much . . .”

  This statement was immediately belied by the arrival of Barbara Davis (that’s Mrs. Marvin Davis to you), who stopped by our table and invited Collins to a private screening of Beverly Hills Cop III at her house the next night, which Collins gladly accepted.

  The truth is, you cannot be around Jackie Collins for five minutes without feeling plugged-in. She’s a cottage industry of droll asides and hot tips on everything adventurous, fun, and in. She loves going to the Pleasure Chest on Santa Monica—“I can prowl around watching people”—and was probably the first on her block to go to the Gospel Brunch at the House of Blues and the Atlas, at the corner of Wilshire and Western, where, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the dance floor is filled with amazing tango types in sultry clothes—even a man who, in the darkish light, seems like Valentino himself. (“I wo
uld love to take tango lessons,” she said.)

  “I’m not good at doing ladies-who-lunch,” she admitted. “The kind who talk about the help or the new makeup or which plastic surgeon they’re going to. I’m one of the boys, actually. When I’m at a party, I like to sit with the men, play a little pool, and hear what’s going on. Guys will come and talk to me about their relationships, how they feel about women. I love those conversations.”

  Many of those conversations, in one form or another, make it into Collins’ books. It’s the clef—the sense that her characters and even their most outrageous erotic adventures come from an insider’s knowledge of real life in the jet set—that makes her novels so seductive. She’s been in the john when everyone is doing coke; she’s been at the beach house when the drunken director is seducing the underage starlet. Reading Collins, you know you’re chewing on slices of the real—albeit decadent—thing. And her newest, Hollywood Kids, due out this month, is no exception.

  Having just finished reading the unbound manuscript, I was still full of the story of Cheryl Landers, daughter of studio head Ethan Landers, who, for something to do, goes into the madam business, finding and supplying gorgeous actress-model-hookers to the rich and famous of Hollywood.

  “I started this book before Heidi Fleiss,” Collins said. “So it’s a lovely coincidence, having one of the kids in my book being a madam, but still, there’s a lot of that going on here, isn’t there?”

  “Yes,” I said, “Los Angeles has never been shy.”

  One of Collins’s main sources for the inside scoop on Hollywood kids was L.A.’s limo drivers. “People do things in limos they don’t do in real life,” she said. “Young Hollywood uses them a lot, and they think the drivers don’t exist!” Other sources were “the waiters at Bar One, car attendants, and hairdressers.”