Of course you've already heard that the Hollywood sign and the entire mountain it resides on is for sale. Maybe you didn't. It was ironic news a few months ago. No one who lives here cares, and why should they.
Not long ago, some preservation crazoid tried to save an apartment Charles Bukowski once rented. Can you imagine? “Buk” was nothing but a sentimental, sadistic alcoholic with delicate hands and minor gifts. In other words, he was like most writers—except the part about being canonized by Germany and having “new” books come out every year after you die.
Some say I drop too many names in my novels. Twenty-five years ago I stopped reading books. I only read reviews. Everything I know about Hart Crane or Theodore Roethke or Walter Benjamin or Guy Debord or, say, the letters of Flaubert and Conrad or the fiction/nonfiction work of countless others are from reviews. One of the things I enjoy most are magazine articles about finicky men with arcane tastes who invariably are close friends with Leon Wieseltier.
Here's some name-dropping: I was having breakfast with James Ellroy at the Polo Lounge. Ellroy likes to say he's the Wasp Me and I'm the Jewish Him. Tender Ellroy is a comically harsh Calvinist—I call him the Calvinator. We like to go to the Polo Lounge and talk about the shit service. We go to Kate Mantellini's and talk about the shit service. We go to the Pacific Dining Car, which still remains close to our hearts (he actually got married there), and talk about the shit service/shit new decor. So there we were at the Polo Lounge, on our way to the men's room. We spot the director Joel Schumacher on a cellphone. Both Ellroy and I have known Schumacher for years, en passant, and whenever he sees one of us he calls out, “You're a fucking genius!” Yet as we go to the head, he looks straight through us, and it's not because he's engaged in conversation. Ellroy says, sotto voce, “Schumacher stopped acknowledging me six run-ins ago.” Ellroy is always dead-on about this or that nuance too subtle to even find conscious voice. “Same here,” I say. “About four run-ins ago.” Maybe our shelf life's up. Maybe Joel's going blind. So Ellroy vanishes and I seize the opportunity to sit on the opposing side of the freak ottoman. Like a scumbag, I position myself to eavesdrop as Schumacher talks. “Jesus,” he says. “Tom asked J.J. to call People? I wonder what I'd do if a movie star called me up and asked me that. I'd probably say no.” This was the week of the Tom Cruise Scientology YouTube kerfuffle, so it isn't tough to deduce that Tom called J.J. Abrams and asked J.J. to call in with a spin quote. (A few days later, a single page appeared in People with a bunch of celebs—including J.J.—giving innocuous little tribute blurbs to Tom: good soldiers. Jim Carrey was even in there.) Ellroy comes out of the john, disgusted with my low-tech Pellicano hijinks.
Heath Ledger dies the same day, if memory serves. Memory is a dish best served cold. My snapshot L.A. morning becomes a Day of the Locust convergence. Suddenly, everyone's nervous again about mixing booze, Ambien, SSRIs, Inderal, Adderall, L-tryptophan, GABA, blow, whatever. Those grim reaper kewpies the Olsens, with their perma-Starbucks cups and formaldehyde pouts, are in the news again, like the grown-up twins from The Shining. Someone should put them in a remake of The Hunger. Call Anthony Minghella.
Now please let me drop more names.
Ten years ago, I wrote an unshootable kabuki thing, a ghost opera that took place in Hollywood, closer in tone to Kwaidan than Sunset Boulevard. David Cronenberg said he wanted to make it. He was hot after A History of Violence. He flew to NYC and had lunch with Julianne Moore, and she said Yes. Viggo wanted in as well. It was a go, then fell apart in five days, and David did Eastern Promises. I told him if he got nominated for Best Director I'd drive him to the Academy Awards. (When I was in my early 20s, I used to drive a limo out of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Ellroy and I would never have trashed it back in the day.) Viggo got a nom instead and asked David to be his Oscar date. David called to see if I still wanted to do the chauffeur thing. I said Yes, but got that L.A. loser feeling. A week later, David called to say apparently Viggo had invited his niece and his publicist and was kind of arranging everything, and because it was his special night, the director didn't feel comfortable complicating it with my ruse. I said drolly, “Perfect! We didn't make our movie, and now even my asinine little stunt isn't going to happen.” A week later, David's best friend's wife died of a brain thing, so he went to the memorial in Toronto and missed the awards.
Death Stays in the Picture.
I would like to drop some more names, please. For your enchanted entertainment.
My fiancée and I had dinner with Helmut Newton on the night before he died—myself; Laura; Helmut; his wife, June; Andre Balazs and Uma Thurman. (Apparently, hundreds of people had dinner with Mr. Newton before he died. Okay, so I'm thinking that maybe we had our dinner the night before the night before he died. If memory serves.) Laura looks like June used to when she was young, and Mr. Newton became sweetly, innocuously fixated on her. He got fixated on my Escalade, too, said the Cadillac people were “giving” him one tomorrow. Talking about automobiles moved me to tell him a favorite joke of mine: “I want to die in my sleep, like my father did—not like the other three people in the car.” Newton laughed so hard I thought he was going to have a heart attack, but the heart attack came the next day when he was behind the wheel of the free Caddy (a white one, white like Death) and he ran into a wall outside the Chateau, where he always stayed and where everybody dies.
Life imitates joke.
My father died last August. We were estranged. He produced an early talk show starring Les Crane that filmed at the old Beverly Wilshire pool. Crane was married to Tina Louise. That was in the '60s, when we lived in a rented house on Rodeo Drive (South Rodeo, but we still couldn't afford it), a few doors down from Broderick Crawford, whose starlet wife had OD'd not long after they split. At the end of August, my estranged father died and we had talked on the phone that very week. I offered to come to Florida to see him. He said No, he'd just left a convalescent home and wanted to get stronger. Put on more weight before he saw me, but I knew the real truth. “I am very much looking forward to your visit,” said Mort—that was his name—Mort!—“when both our schedules allow.” Twenty years ago I would have been offended, but now I thought his last words were ravishingly poignant. We buried him in New York, and the rabbi told us to put the dirt on the convex part of the shovel “to show we're not in a hurry.”
I want to die in my sleep like my father did.
What follows is true, and is all that matters. A dear friend of mine has an only child, a 14-year-old daughter. One day she looked at the girl's diary. She told the kid about it—“we share everything”—and Lily was blithely forgiving. My friend said that what she read was a love letter, never sent. At least she thought that's what it was. “...I have this huge crush—a celebrity crush. I am in love with someone I will never meet. I only wish I could do it. I only wish it would love me back because we would be so happy together. We would learn all about each other. Lovers don't complete each other but we would still complement each other. I try to think as it thinks so I can win it over, this writing, this rock-star. I learn what I can about it so I can make it love me. I wonder if this is one of those times when love can be from need and effort. Love me. Please. You would make me happy if you came to me and brought me out. You are beautiful, the thought of you is beautiful. When I touch you, I feel unworthy.”
Turns out it was a love letter—but to the Gods of Writing.
She wants to be a writer. That was Lily's prayer and offertory.
All that matters.
So: there's your entertainment. Your dead-end cosmic name-drop.
It gave me strength to go on a while longer.
I want to die in my sleep like my father.
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