“I have bad news,” he said.
“Oh?”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you.”
“Huh?”
“We can’t take you on.”
“You haven’t seen me act yet. Shelley Winters said—”
“Yeah, I know what Shelley said, but Shelley is female. And she’s Shelley Winters. I have too many young male clients who look just like you. They come first.”
I walked out of the office deflated, torn. Too many clients? Fuck Herb Brenner. What was I going to do? I was broke. I had only a few dollars, a dirty couch to live on, and a Volkswagen Bug with a blown engine. I had to find a job. And an agent. Being turned down by the famous Mr. Brenner was heartbreaking. I felt like giving up, but the ongoing rejection was instead an inspiration for me to stay in the fray. My father told me, when I was a kid: “A Goldsmith never gives up.” Over the years to come, Los Angeles was going to test that determination.
Never Make It Final
Without an agent, I had to rely on the few connections I did have. I called on William Inge, the playwright from Natural Affection, the play we put on at the Sombrero in Phoenix. We’d traded letters, and soon after I arrived in Los Angeles, Inge invited me to his home.
“I’m having a painting party,” he told me, and so I set off into the Hollywood Hills to find his upscale cottage, which was tucked in on one of the streets named for birds—Oriole or Robin. I found the home, went inside, and stepped onto a drop cloth, one of many covering the home’s floors. The open windows looked out over the city. Wow, I thought: This really is Los Angeles. Looking around at the guests Inge had assembled, I noticed they all had some things in common: All were young guys, all good-looking, and all fluttering about with brushes and rollers.
Wait a second.
Not that I had any problem with gay guys, of course. I was from the theater scene in New York, a self-styled bohemian. Not my cup of tea, but to each his own.
Then Inge appeared, welcoming me to his home. He was giggly.
“Would you like to take a shower?” he asked me.
“Oh, c’mon, Bill. Take one of these guys,” I said, pointing to the collection of young bucks he’d assembled.
“It’s just a shower,” he said. “I’ll do your back.”
I demurred, but in a flattering, self-deprecating, and joking way. We became close friends. Inge was sick. Though he was a recovering alcoholic of some years, he was still a depressive. He spent hours talking to me, revealing these deep thoughts. Once, I told him, “I lay awake at night for hours thinking, How am I going to get there?”
Inge had heard it all before.
“I lay awake at night for hours too, thinking, How am I going to stay there?” he told me.
Inge was troubled.
“I’m probably going to kill myself,” he told me one day.
“Well, I hope that you don’t,” I said.
“No, I’m going to kill myself,” Inge said.
“The sun comes up, the day changes,” I said, reminding him of the fleeting nature of emotions. The rationale was not good enough. Soon after our last talk, I received news that Inge had gone out to his garage in that same charming cottage, started his car’s engine, filled the chamber with carbon monoxide, and killed himself just like he’d told me he would.
“Death makes us all innocent,” Inge had written, “and weaves all our private hurts and griefs and wrongs into the fabric of time, and makes them a part of eternity.”
Inge’s death preyed on me. At night, I thought my own dark thoughts, which accompanied each fresh rejection and crept often into my mind. I wondered, having these thoughts that plagued me too: Could I do it? Could I go through with it like Inge, given the pain I sometimes felt? Sure, I could make everyone laugh, but in the process, hearing all the laughter, I wondered: Don’t they get it? I’m in a lot of pain here. How can they not see that? What’s the matter with them?
At daybreak, relief would set in. The air would fill with light and deliver a new morning, a new chance to find a role. Several months had passed and I knew success for me would never be about talent, luck, or connections. My path would have to be about endurance. As Vernon Scott, a critic friend from the Hollywood Reporter, once told me after working out in a gym, “You have to outlast the bastards.”
Even the Lowliest Job Can Lead to Another Job
If I was going to outlast the bastards, I’d need to last. I needed a job to sustain me as I pursued my acting career. For a lead, I scanned the Rolodex in my mind for the name of a friend, an acquaintance, even a stranger I had met only once who might live in Los Angeles and could help. I remembered Jack Brown, whom I had appeared with in a few scenes back in New York. I looked him up and told him I was looking for work, and he recommended I visit the main office of a construction company he knew. They were always hiring. The pay was terrible, he warned, but the work was immediate. No questions asked.
Jack was right. I went to the office and was offered a job on the spot: garbageman. Just perfect. My duties were simple: arrive on a construction site with a truck, load it with industrial waste, and drive it out to the dump. The hours ranged from dawn until late. The pay was a pittance: three dollars an hour. I graciously accepted, but the labor was brutal. I’d arrived in Los Angeles in the dead of summer, and by midmorning the temperatures had reached ninety degrees and climbing. My garbage truck had no air-conditioning, of course, and I’d drive across the valley to sites in Calabasas to pick up waste—ratty insulation or industrial scraps of old pipes, tar paper, and general debris, all dusted over with a demi-glace of rat shit—then drag it all out to the dump. Even in those days the traffic was relentless, and to catch a break I’d lie in the shade of a palm tree in a park, wondering how I’d messed up by moving west. My life had become a wreck, and I was on the precipice, unclear if I had the personal fortitude to work my way back.
Looking for a better job, I stopped off at the unemployment office. It was the happening place. The steadiest form of income for actors in the union, of which I was a member, was the unemployment checks we could claim between jobs. The office was at the intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and Las Palmas in Hollywood, and we all hung out there. It was a networking event and social mixer rolled into one, with the added bonus of free money. You’d see the extras in their rags and the stars with their chauffeurs and big cars parked out front. I never saw it, but I heard my friend Shelley Winters showed up occasionally with her driver in a limo and picked up her unemployment check wearing a mink coat.
We developed a routine. After we got our checks, we’d head down the street to the Formosa Cafe for Chinese food. The Formosa was a nexus of Hollywood’s misfits: mobsters, screenwriters, boxers. The menu was Cantonese, but the owner was Jimmy Bernstein. He’d been in the fight game so long that the country’s most famous boxers—legends like Jack Dempsey and Joe Louis—would swing by, along with executives from Goldwyn Studios across the street. The place was made from an old trolley car, with deep, red leather booths and dim lighting. We sat there for hours, wondering who might come in. Elvis Presley was such a regular at the Formosa, we heard, he once gave a waitress there a Cadillac as a tip.
I hadn’t gotten an acting job in so long that the unemployment checks ran out, and I had to find another job. I was tired of hauling garbage, so the unemployment office assigned me a caseworker.
“So, what kind of work are you looking for?” she asked me.
“Anything,” I told her.
“Are you handy? You do carpentry, plumbing, painting, that kind of thing?”
“Of course,” I said, lying through my teeth. I couldn’t even fix a toilet.
“Would you mop floors?” she asked.
“Anything,” I said, sighing.
“I might have something for a young man of your talents,” she said, and instructed me to purchase my own mop and pail and to report
for work the next day. She didn’t tell me what I’d be doing with the mop and pail but handed me a slip of paper with an address on Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills. This didn’t sound promising, but that address would change the course of my career.
Before it became known as a home for Hollywood’s elite, Beverly Hills was a lima bean farm. At the turn of the century, a developer purchased all the farms there, hoping to dig for oil. The testing proved the land was dry, so the developer needed another way to turn those old lima bean farms into lucrative parcels. So he built the Beverly Hills Hotel, a destination resort for actors and others en route to Los Angeles. The first movie stars stayed there and settled, building their mansions near the hotel, where the beans once grew. The first to go up was Pickfair, the massive twenty-five-room Tudor-style estate owned by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, with horse stables, a tennis court, a swimming pool, and frescoes painted on the ceiling.
The scions of early film—Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Will Rogers—all built their estates near Pickfair, and the neighborhood when I arrived still had its own star map. Elvis Presley lived on Peruvia Way. Kirk Douglas was on North Canon. Doris Day, on North Crescent. James Stewart was on Roxbury, where I was headed, only a few blocks away.
I was walking through Beverly Hills with my new mop and pail when I passed by Jergens, then a famous fruit and vegetable stand. The colors of the fabulous fruit outside triggered my salivary glands. I was still always hungry. I was saving every dollar, so after surveying the strawberries, watermelons, and mangoes, I made a frugal choice: a banana. Did I pay for it? Did I steal it? Does it matter? In those days, a piece of stolen fruit wasn’t the end of the world. Who’d miss a banana?
The temperatures were rising, and I found a spot of shade. I rested the mop against the tree, flipped over my new pail, and sat down. My shirt was soaked with sweat and I removed it to air it out. I had just started to eat when I heard a voice.
“Hey, come here.”
I turned. A Beverly Hills police officer was staring at me.
“Me?” I mumbled, mouth full of banana.
“Yeah, you. What are you doing?”
“Eating my breakfast, Officer.” I swallowed. “And going to work.”
He asked me for identification. I didn’t have any. Now I had to convince him I was not an illegal border worker from El Salvador with my mop and pail but instead an aspiring actor from New York. This copper had no sense of humor.
“You don’t walk around Beverly Hills like that,” he said, pointing at my shirt and demanding I put it back on. I obediently obliged. I’d come to Los Angeles wanting to live in Beverly Hills, not get arrested there for eating a banana topless.
He was right, though. You didn’t walk around Beverly Hills like that. In fact, no one walked around Beverly Hills at all, or anywhere else in Los Angeles. Except me.
I finally made my way to Roxbury Drive. The palm trees here were taller and the houses bigger, it seemed. The lawns were all set back, and Mexican gardeners tended to the hedges as luxury cars sparkled in the driveways. I walked up the path, and Rita Rubins opened the door to greet me. She was wearing a muumuu. A cigarette dangled from her lip. She was a buxom blonde, a little overweight. A lovely woman: warm and voluptuous.
She gave me a tour, and as we walked through her immaculate home, she told me about her past. She had come to Los Angeles and married Paul Whitcomb, a major director. He’d once been under contract at Columbia Pictures and made several features, all so boring and unmemorable I can’t name a single one. I do, however, recall seeing him pass through the house in his jodhpurs and monocle, fancying himself a Yiddish version of Erich von Stroheim. Despite his arrogance, this obnoxious director had lived in town for more than twenty years and was a great connection for me to develop. I hoped he could find me work on sets and make my career.
I soon learned that Rita was lonely, alienated from her pretentious husband. He was never around, she complained. Just left her behind, she said, as we proceeded to go over my first assignment: mopping floors. She also asked if I could build a small shed. “Of course,” I confidently replied. I went to the store, got all the parts and supplies, and proceeded to create a disaster. I had my doubts it would last the season, and when the first fall breeze blew, it fell down. I was totally inept.
My next project was painting the bedroom for Herman, their son, who was mentally challenged. I screwed it up so many times she let me come up with the splatter-paint design for the floor, à la Jackson Pollock, to cover up all the messes. I couldn’t do any of the jobs right. Rita didn’t complain. She was attracted to me and desperate for the affection her husband never gave her.
We developed a friendly routine. I’d arrive each morning, and she’d cook me the same breakfast: scrambled eggs and cottage cheese. Sitting across from me, ubiquitous cigarette dangling from her lip, she’d be the first of many married women to reveal they were starved for passion. The more we talked, the more the tension between Rita and me escalated. And one day, we ended up on the floor of the maid’s bathroom. In truth, it was kind of glorious.
I felt a little guilty about the indulgence. After all, I hadn’t come to Hollywood to satisfy the desires of married women. I wanted to be an actor, and if Rita’s powerful husband discovered our dalliances, I’d never have a chance with him. I might not just lose a good connection; I could be blackballed among Hollywood’s insular hive.
Not that I had a shot with Otto von Stroheim, anyway. He was a prick, I’d quickly learn. Egotistical, slightly maniacal. Rita would invite me to all these parties he threw at the house for their actor friends, and he’d have all these starlets there and not pay any attention to Rita. That was now my job.
Over breakfast one morning, she startled me.
“You know, you’re a jerk,” she said.
“Why do you say that, Rita?”
“You’re giving it away.”
I didn’t know what she meant at first.
“I’m going to fix you up with somebody who’s really going to take good care of you.”
“I’m not a fucking gigolo,” I said.
She pointed her finger at me.
“Be smart,” she said. “You’re a good-looking kid. Use your assets. Don’t be a schmuck.”
Then she told me about Beth.
“She’s a little older,” she said.
“How old?”
“Late fifties,” Rita said.
I felt queasy. My mother was in her late fifties.
“She’s put together,” Rita said.
“What does that mean?”
“She plays three-wall handball. What can I tell you?”
“I don’t know, Rita,” I said, not convinced. “What can you tell me?”
“Her husband owns a casino in Las Vegas,” she said.
Great. Another married woman with a powerful husband. Only this time, instead of getting tarnished among a small group of film executives, I’d wind up in a grave near the Hoover Dam. Back then, all of Las Vegas’s hotels and casinos were run by the mob.
“He doesn’t bother with her at all,” Rita said, going on about Beth’s mobbed-up husband. “They don’t have a marriage. It’s just in name only.”
I wasn’t convinced.
“Look, putz, she took her hairdresser to Paris and bought him a wardrobe, and he’s a fagelah! You could really score!”
At the breakfast table, my scrambled eggs and cottage cheese were getting cold.
“Look at you,” she said. “You need some clothes. You need a shirt and tie.”
I tried to fight her. Really, I did. But I am not proud to admit I eventually succumbed to Rita’s urging and went along with her plan. Instead of working to try to rebuild the shed that morning, I got into Rita’s car and she drove me to Saks. We went up to the men’s section, and I tried on a crisp white shirt, found a tie I liked, and took
them both home. I hadn’t purchased new clothes in years and was touched that Rita would make the gesture. We were good friends. So good, we never made it back to the maid’s bathroom.
“This is very nice of you,” I said appreciatively.
“Just play your cards right and she’ll treat you well,” she said. “You deserve it.”
Play your cards right. Aha. Now I was getting to know what that phrase meant.
“You’ll be meeting her at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. You know where that is?”
I had frequently passed the Beverly Wilshire Hotel when I was hauling garbage. It was and still is frequented by stars and movers in all aspects of show business. There was a coffee shop on the street level called the Pink Turtle. I would see the most beautiful array of starlets going into the lobby, as well as the café. From my vantage point in the truck, there seemed to be an unusual amount of these lovelies convening there, even in a town known for beautiful women. They were young, tanned, and dressed to kill, be it nine in the morning, when I started my route, or later in the day, when I was returning. I had to investigate.
I began to frequent the Pink Turtle. Their scrambled eggs were delicious (although not as good as Rita’s) and not outrageously priced. I soon uncovered the reason for the marvelous and endless parade of women, and it would prove a major boost to my social life: Warren Beatty. He lived in the penthouse of the hotel, and I found an ingenious way to break the ice.
“Hi! Are you waiting to see Warren?” I would inquire. Thinking I was an aide-de-camp and a conduit to the legendary lothario, they would light up and be extremely receptive to dialogue.
“Well, Warren’s tied up at the moment. But he asked me to buy you a drink.” Most were eager to comply—at least now they were on his radar. The Wilshire bar was a bit upscale for my garbageman’s salary, so I would whisk them down the street to a Chinese restaurant that had a great—and reasonable—happy hour.
So, yes, Rita. I knew where the Beverly Wilshire Hotel was.
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