I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  “I could have told so much more,” said Collins, “but nobody would believe what Hollywood kids are really like.”

  Apparently, in addition to being crybabies, they’ve all slept with one another. “There’s one particular person I wanted to write about, but it’s just too unbelievable,” Collins confided, and then proceeded to tell me a story so sordid her editors banned it from the book—and so would the editors of this magazine. Suffice it to say, it dealt with a producer, some call girls, and a glass table—and that Salvador Dalí wouldn’t have been surprised. “I tried a toned-down version of it, and my editor kept saying, ‘Your heroine is so raunchy. Do people really talk like this?’ And I said, ‘Fuck, yes!’ ”

  “Well, I guess they haven’t been to the Viper Room,” I said.

  “I love sensuality—erotic sensuality,” Collins said, expressing a sentiment that made me think more of the Italian Riviera than Melrose Place, where both men and women tend to be quite calculating about whom they sleep with. “That is one thing that’s actually a little lacking in Los Angeles, because people here are so into perfection.”

  •

  The main character in Hollywood Kids is Jordanna Levitt, a “cross between her breathtakingly beautiful mother and her craggy macho father . . . more European than American,” who drives around in a white Porsche. Kind of a cross between Sofia Coppola and Bridget Fonda . . . maybe. Her emotional history is that her mother committed suicide when she was still a child, her brother jumped out a window and killed himself when she was sixteen, and her best friend, Fran, killed herself the following year. In other words, a typical Hollywood childhood. Jordanna can’t forgive her veteran producer father for keeping her at a distance or for marrying four too-young types.

  She hangs out at a place that sounds almost exactly like the now-gone Helena’s, called Homebase Central, where she meets four other sons and daughters of Hollywood royalty: Cheryl Landers; Grant Lennon Jr., an agent and “the dissolute son of Grant Lennon, a movie icon”; Marjory Sanderson, anorexic daughter of a “billionaire television magnate” (Tori Spelling?); and Shep Worth, son of aging sex symbol Taurean Worth (Liz? Cher?), who has a long line of ex-husbands. These kids have all had “too much, too soon. A Porsche at sixteen. Handfuls of credit cards. European vacations. The best tables at the hottest restaurants. And endless lavish parties.” And they’re all looking for something that will fill up the void inside them.

  Also tossed into this stylish ragout are a Vanity Fair–style journalist widow from Connecticut named Kennedy Chase; an up-and-coming actor-producer named Bobby Rush, whose father, Jerry (a star of Kirk Douglas’s magnitude), has made drunken passes at all of his girlfriends; director Mac Brooks, whom, in typical Collins fashion, we first meet with his wife, movie star Sharleen Wynn, about to have sex in their yellow Rolls-Royce; a retired but cute New York cop who comes to L.A. looking for his ex-wife and daughter; and, last but not least, a serial murderer who speaks in italics.

  But my favorite character is Charlie Dollar, “hardly your average matinee idol. He was overweight with a comfortable gut, fifty-three years old, and slightly balding. But when Charlie Dollar smiled, the world lit up . . . for Charlie possessed a particularly wild stoned charm that was irresistible to both men and women.” Now if he isn’t a dead ringer for Jack Nicholson, I don’t know who is.

  The book braids three strands: AIDS in the background like the plague; the impulse to be sexy and fabulous; and the practical plodding of life, where days have to be filled somehow, if not by work then trouble, since we all know what idle hands lead to, especially in Hollywood. Let’s just say it ends not with a bang but with a gigantic shoot-out up in Laurel Canyon.

  Despite the high drama, Collins prefers to keep her eye on ordinary happiness in Hollywood Kids. After all, at the end, Jordanna finds what everyone really needs in life: a job, true love, and the ability to stop blaming her bad childhood for her rotten temper. “They all seem to have some beef with their childhoods,” I said.

  “I know,” she replied. “That’s so wrong. I’m a great believer that you seize your own life. You know, when you’re twelve, you should say, ‘OK, I’m not going to blame anything on my mother and father—this is what I’m going to do with my life, and I’m going to make the most of it.’ ”

  The truth is, Collins feels sorry for Hollywood kids. A great sadness seems to hang over their decadent little monster heads—the result of never really getting to see their parents or feeling they can never match their parents’ success, all while being raised in the lap of luxury. What fascinates her is the knowledge that, though the world envies these kids, they themselves realize what a sour prize celebrity is.

  Collins’s own childhood wasn’t exactly stiff-upper-lip British. Her father was a theatrical agent in London, and she had a relatively sophisticated home life. Both parents were well along in years, and sister Joan was eighteen when Jackie was born. “Growing up, I read the whole time and lived in a fantasy world,” she said. “I was English but pretended I was American and couldn’t reveal my own identity, and I wouldn’t hang out with other kids. I would go home and write and then sneak out the window and go to the movies.”

  This picaresque youth screeched to a halt with Collins’s expulsion from school at fifteen. “I was thrown out for smoking, being truant, and waving at the resident flasher,” she said wickedly. “We used to walk past him in our little tennis uniforms every Tuesday afternoon, and he would be flashing away, and I would point and laugh and say, ‘Oooh, it must be very cold today.’ I only came to school on Tuesdays to see the flasher. The rest of the time, I’d get these great notes from my mother to get out of school.”

  In 1956, she packed up and came to Hollywood to stay a few years with her ultraglam movie star sister. “Joan was living at the Chateau Marmont and having an affair with Warren Beatty, and I thought we were going to share this rather affluent suite. But what happened was, I was sent up to his little attic room, and Joan left town to go on location. So I bummed around town on my own for two years. All the ‘research’ I did then has proved extremely useful!”

  Collins then moved back to England, where, at eighteen, she indulged in her first, rather volatile, marriage to Wallace Austin, a “very cute, very manic Jewish-prince drug addict.” They lived in London, where Austin’s principal occupation was gambling. “He was in his thirties, and we would do wild things like go for dinner in London and end up on a plane to the South of France, where we would gamble for twenty-four hours.” Collins had her first child, Tracy, in her first year of marriage, and then hit rough seas.

  “I had a little child, a maniac husband who hid his drugs from me, and a dying mother—it was a very traumatic time. I feel when I write about people who have drug problems I really know what I’m talking about, because, well, he killed himself.”

  Austin died from a drug overdose, but by then Collins had divorced him and begun a brief but action-packed acting career that included roles on The Saint and The Avengers. Then she wrote her first book, The World Is Full of Married Men. “I was fed up with the way married men came on to me. I’d say, ‘Well, what about your wife?’ and they’d all say, ‘Oh, my wife’s different—she’s happy staying at home.’ I thought, What two-faced, double-standard sons of bitches. I’ve got to write about this!”

  She also thought it would be nice to make some money. And, unlike so many books written for that reason, Married Men actually became a best seller, was published in thirty-two languages, and caused a homegrown scandal as well. Members of Parliament were not pleased to find single women behaving that way—that is, fucking around and not caring about marriage. Collins laughed at the memory. “The English are so stodgy—and decadent at the same time.”

  When she was well established in Britain, she met her second husband, Oscar Lerman, an American twenty-five years her senior. “He saw my picture in a magazine and came to London to search me out. A friend fixed us up on a blind date, and we hated each other. Then, a year la
ter, I would see him at the Ad Lib, this discotheque he owned where the Beatles and the Rolling Stones would hang out. He invited me to a Diana Ross concert, and I wanted to see her, so I went. On our second date, he asked me to marry him!”

  Lerman encouraged her to shoot for an American best seller and decided they should move to L.A., so she could gather material for Hollywood Wives. One of the London clubs Lerman owned was the ultrasuccessful Tramp, and when they arrived here in 1980 he opened a West Coast version, and the couple socialized with the same jet-setters they’d met in London. Today, she spends time with the Davises, Billy and Audrey Wilder, and Sidney and Joanna Poitier. “And I have lots of younger friends through Tracy, like Tony Danza,” she said.

  “Are you friends with Joan?”

  “Yes,” she said, “we’re good friends. But she lives in Europe, and I live here. When I go there, we have dinner and vice versa. We’re sisters—we’re not joined at the hip!”

  Lerman died two years ago of prostate cancer. “We had a wonderful life,” she said. And two daughters, Tiffany and Rory. Now a very unsedate widow, Collins has no desire to return to England. “L.A. is the most beautiful place,” she said. “Flying in at night is just an orgasmic thrill. And I love the people; they’ve all got a story. I love the excitement. Even the earthquakes give the place a kind of edge. Everything’s open twenty-four hours. You can get mugged day or night.”

  Over our scallop salads, I wondered if any of her children had been caught up in the flagrant actions of Hollywood kid-dom. But strict Catholic schools in London and Los Angeles, plus her own vigilant mothering skills, apparently kept Collins’s three daughters on the straight and narrow. Unlike her fictional families of divorced parents and mothers who kill themselves or are alcoholics or otherwise impossible, Collins stayed happily married, never left town except to publicize books and was way too sensible to give her daughters Porsches at sixteen. Now, they’re grown and flown: two in London, one still in Los Angeles.

  Rearing them, Collins said, there wasn’t much downtime. “I would basically be two people. One was Jackie Collins the writer who went on talk shows or to her husband’s club. The other was a mother, taking them to and from school, and writing in the car at stoplights. Then I would go home and cook them dinner and deal with their homework and get them to bed. And then, about ten every night, I would put on makeup and get dressed up and go to my husband’s club, where I would sit entertaining people until two or three in the morning.”

  The truth is that during the eighties, she and her husband “hated” to have to socialize at Tramp. “However exclusive a Hollywood club is, you can’t keep out the drug dealers and hookers,” she said. “The stars want the drug dealers around, and the single guys want the hookers around. So they all bring them in, and before you know where you are, you’re knee-deep in drug dealers and hookers. But for me, it was all grist for the mill.”

  “I’m sure they entertained you with lots of stories,” I said.

  “Oh yeah—exactly.”

  •

  Nowadays, Collins lives in Beverly Hills. So fertile is her mind, she’s working on not just one book but several. She’s looking forward to producing the Hollywood Kids miniseries, and while it’s obvious she enjoys living life to the hilt, she is equally happy writing about the even more orgasmic adventures of her titillating characters.

  “I feel like I’m turning into one of my heroines,” she said. “They’re all based on girls who claw their way to recognition. They feel strong, and I want to show that women in general are strong, that they don’t have to be pushed around and be victims.”

  “Do people pour out their hearts to you because they know you’re a writer and they want you to tell their side of the story?” I asked as we finished our lunch.

  “I think I’m just an extremely good listener, which is rare in Hollywood,” she said. “You know, everyone’s looking over your shoulder at the door to see if someone more famous is going to come in, somebody they should be with rather than you. I hate that. If somebody gets my attention, they get my undivided attention. I guess men like that.”

  “Plus, you probably give them funny replies.”

  “Exactly! Show me a decrepit old billionaire, and I’ll show you a fan,” she said with a wicked laugh.

  We had finished our cappuccinos and were out in the hideous blast of noonday sun, and yet the traffic on Sunset wasn’t bad, it being a sort of slow day—O. J. still not having been found and his Bronco’s slow-motion stampede along the freeways yet to come.

  As I drove home, I thought how Collins’s books are not really about shopping (only her villains shop) or even sex. She writes about emotions—and dreams coming true. And, OK, so there is sex. “All we’re looking for,” she had said, “is to wake up in the morning with someone who makes you happy, who makes you laugh, and with whom you have great sex.”

  Had she found it?

  “Well,” she said modestly, “I sort of have—at the moment.”

  Los Angeles

  September 1994

  KEEPING TIME IN OJAI

  IN THE 1994 Ojai Music Festival Playbill, Michael Tilson Thomas, the musical director, wrote: “I can clearly remember the clear, dusty California days, shadowed by live oak and sycamore with the music and presence of Ingolf Dahl, Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss, Alice Ehlers, Sol Babitz, Mel Powell, and Pierre Boulez to name but a few . . .” My father, Sol Babitz, was the first violinist in the orchestras then, plus one of the originators of the Ojai festival, which he loved because they played interesting and early modern music.

  Tilson Thomas was dedicating this music festival to his memory of those earlier times, times I too remember, though I cannot remember when I first went to the Ojai music festivals because I was too young, but I remember every year, in around April or May, my father would get out these various sheets showing an orchestra’s seating arrangements for different pieces of music, and he’d be on the phone, day and night, acquiring musicians to fill those seats—and the great ladies of Ojai would allow these musicians and their children to come stay during the festival weekend, so what I remember first, being one of the children, was the lane scented with orange blossoms and honey-suckle as we drove to Mrs. Grant’s house. She was a classical kindly old American lady with spectacles, with a beautiful old bungalow house with a stone porch, filled with remnants of travel in China, like a ruby-handled letter opener. She had an orange grove behind her house and something of a farm with chickens and cows too; it was paradise, a house inside full of books and culture, and outside the Country in the way old California was “country.” And in the backyard, she always had kittens that my sister and I considered just further evidence that the best place on earth was Ojai.

  In the mornings Mrs. Grant would make my sister and me fresh orange juice and cinnamon toast and then we’d go play with the kittens and we definitely hated being dragged to concerts and considered one of the fabulous things about being an adult that we’d never have to go to a concert again.

  In later life, what I loved about concerts were the intermissions where you could find great funny people who talked a mile a minute and were deeply civilized, but still to this day, the idea of being stuck, having to sit through a concert, drives me somewhat over the edge, though once I’m there, I usually find something funny enough or transcendent enough or amazing enough to capture my imagination, at least for a few moments.

  Last year, my friend Paul Ruscha and drove up to Ojai and stayed for two nights, not with Mrs. Grant, who is now, alas, dead and her home but a sigh in my memory, but at the fabulous Ojai Valley Inn, which has lately undergone a $35 million makeover and is now a place transcendent among golf fanciers, though even for the ordinary person, the lanes lined with honeysuckle and the balconies of jasmine are a thrill, as are the great birdcages outdoors filled with spectacular parrots and various other things and the indoor birdcages filled with gorgeous chirpers too. For breakfast, their open buffet is so decadent that Paul co
uld hardly walk after actually eating eggs Benedict, which I guess is OK because I am his sole beneficiary though if I weren’t, I’d rather he stick to the oatmeal and all the great fruit they had as well as the divine muffins and incredible waffles with maple syrup. (On Sundays they actually had blintzes, which for a Repulican-type golf place is amazingly Jewish.)

  Ojai today is almost exactly like it used to be, the corner with the pharmacy where I used to buy books when I was little is still the corner with the pharmacy and nothing in the town has been allowed to go the least bit slick—there are no malls, no gigantic discount drugstores, no “improvements” that wreck life and make you think California isn’t that great after all.

  If nearby Santa Barbara is the bastion of hidebound city planners absolutely refusing to allow anything but exactly what’s already there to be built again and so determined that the city never even take so much as water from Los Angeles so it won’t have to pander to ignorant nouveau “improvements,” then Ojai is equally bent on quaintness, though being inland and farther away from the hoi polloi, it’s not a gentler, quainter, sweeter grace that, still today, is exactly as marvelous as it must have been in the twenties when it became somewhat of a town and definitely as it was in the early fifties when I remember my first concert rehearsal, for Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat conducted by Edward Rebner, which included a kind of theatrical event, the devil, the solider with his violin (my father played that part), and the princess—and the devil jumped out from under the bed, giving me nightmares for years and years afterward.

  When Paul and I went to the concerts, we sat in the front where I never sat before, since in the olden days when we were children, it was better sitting out on the lawns with picnics and others equally uninterested in music and more interested in the birds or the stars at night. They played a Lukas Foss piece, described as “ungirdled silliness” or something in the Playbill, which did make everyone laugh because it was like Bach only with sampling, things stuck in like Spike Jones did. It was so wild and funny. Sitting way up front, it was practically like being in the orchestra yourself, and it’s great that only about eight hundred people can fit into this bowl because it’s possible not only to park but also to get the feeling that you’re in something personal and special, rather than the way most concerts are today, where it’s so computerized and vast, you can’t wait for the intermission to go stare at people in their clothes.