The Unspeakable

by Meghan Daum

  My parents were not religious, but we did celebrate Christmas. And every Christmas morning my mother served a marbled coffee cake that had somehow been dubbed “Baby Jesus’s birthday cake.” She’d make it the night before and my brother and I would decorate it with plastic Nativity figures, placing Mary and Joseph in the center to suggest a kind of holy wedding cake topper. I’m not sure how many generations back the cake went, but the recipe my mother worked from was in my grandmother’s handwriting, where it was called Jewish coffee cake (my grandmother, who probably knew fewer than five Jews throughout her entire life, must have seen it as an exotic delicacy). Later, I worked from a recipe my mother had written out for me, though now I know it by heart. I can’t give it away, but I can tell you that it calls for white cake mix, vanilla instant pudding, and a carton of sour cream, among other ingredients available not just at your local supermarket but also probably at your local 7-Eleven. I can also tell you that everyone I’ve ever made it for has said it’s the best coffee cake they’ve ever tasted. They’re right. It’s really the best thing in the world.

  INVISIBLE CITY

  It’s now been more than a decade since I moved to Los Angeles and I still sometimes feel, as I did back then, vaguely embarrassed about it. The very act of coming here seems like the ultimate cliché. Even if you arrive for the most mundane, non-Hollywood reason—to go to Cal Tech or to open a dental practice or because your pharmaceutical sales job has transferred you to Torrance—people will still think you’ve come in order to join the “industry.” Or at least make industrial-size sums of money. People will ask if you’ve run into celebrities in the supermarket. If they’re from New York they will be too cool to ask that question but not too embarrassed to fall back on the reliable chestnuts. How bad is the air? How much time do you spend in traffic? Have you gotten Botox yet? Chelation therapy? A colonic? How long did it take you to start calling everyone “dude”? (Actually, they might not know about chelation therapy—and neither should you.)

  These refrains aren’t offensive as much as boring, “too on the nose,” as they say in television writers’ rooms. They’re like equating Texas with cowboy boots or New Jersey with hirsute wannabe (or actual) thugs in gold chains. Not that regional stereotypes aren’t among the most accurate stereotypes out there. As easy as it is to find surprises in a particular locality (who knew Salt Lake City voted for Obama over Romney in 2012?), the nonsurprises usually keep a steadier pace. And this is perhaps more true of Southern California than of most places. From the gag reflex that is the expression “La La Land” (and its cousin, the equally odious “SoCal”) to the predictable iconography of palm trees and luxury cars and fake boobs and Scientologists and pot dispensaries and illegal immigrants and “healers” of every possible sort, there are a million obvious things to say about Los Angeles. Many are just plain wrong, for instance the fallacy that no one reads or is interested in books. (It happens that L.A. has more independent bookstores than the brainy, twee Bay Area around San Francisco.)

  But many of those obvious observations are right. There are a shocking number of people here who feel compelled to drive cars that cost more than, say, your average well-appointed suburban house in Dallas. There was for many years in the aughts a yoga teacher, beloved in studios throughout the city, who made a point of reminding “ladies with implants” to “be mindful of brushing too hard against your mat when moving through chaturanga.” There is a vast amount of real estate in Hollywood owned by a church that believes its members are descended from space aliens. The surreal effects of watching these clichés play out before you in real life and in real time can make your head spin. They can make you feel like the one live person in an animated children’s show.

  I was born in California—in Palo Alto, where my father was working toward a Ph.D. that he’d never really need and my mother was effectively ruining herself for every other location in the world because nowhere else would ever be quite as perfect as the Stanford campus in 1970. I’ve been told that as a baby and toddler I was as much a part of the flora and fauna of the place as any native plant. I was blond and tanned (a tan baby! Can you imagine such a thing now?) and resistant to wearing shoes. Other than faint swatches of memory—a houseplant in a window, a giant sandbox in the married-student housing complex called Escondido Village, faculty mommies wearing Jackie O–style headscarves and hoop earrings—I have no meaningful recollection of the place. But I can say without hyperbole that when I arrived in Los Angeles nearly thirty years later there was a part of me that wasn’t so much forging new territory as reclaiming an original stake. It felt like home even though there was no reason for it to. Moments of déjà vu would pop up in unexpected corners, as though traces of a past life were living inside the walls.

  After Palo Alto, I grew up a little bit in Austin, Texas, and a lot in northern New Jersey. After college, I moved to New York City to live out the only cliché that’s worse than the California cliché, the odyssey of the struggling young writer harboring naïve fantasies of bohemia. I stayed there through my twenties and then moved to the Great Plains, where I lived out an odd little prairie fantasy that mostly entailed drinking cheap wine and sitting on the front porch of my farmhouse watching hallucinatory lightning storms. This was something I could have done forever. Recognizing that fact, I knew it was time to leave. I could have moved back to New York, but I’d grown fond of my car and even fonder of my large dog.

  It made sense to keep moving west, to find a good spot in the vast parking lot that is Los Angeles. I was, coincidentally enough, working on a movie script. During my time in big sky country I’d written a novel largely about drinking wine and watching lightning storms and it was now not only being published but also possibly being turned into a film. Somehow I’d convinced the producers to pay me to write the script, less because I wanted to be a screenwriter than because I wanted Writers’ Guild health insurance. Though this transaction had required a trip “to the coast” (there’s another cloying L.A.-ism; is the east coast not also a “coast”?) for a series of meetings and a heady stay at an Ian Schrager hotel, the job in no way required that I live there. I’m fairly certain I could have fashioned myself into a far hotter, or at least more intriguing, property had I stayed on that porch. But I came anyway.

  How many young essayists/aspiring screenwriters/literary people of any stripe have come to Los Angeles because of that famous photo of Joan Didion with her family on the deck of their house in Malibu? If there is a west coast equivalent of those seminal Woody Allen movies, if L.A. has an Annie Hall or a Manhattan, which is to say if it has a fantastical, hyperaestheticized symbol of its appeal, it has to be that image. Taken in 1976, it shows a sideways-glancing Didion, winsome and tiny in a flowing dress, with perfunctory cigarette in hand and perfunctory gin and tonic (or something thereabouts) perched on the railing. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, leans into the camera as though he’s about to disclose a secret to a friend sitting across from him at a bar table. Their blond daughter wears a polka-dot dress and a wary expression. Decades later we will learn from Didion herself that these years were not all they seemed. But for now the cliffs tumble idyllically beneath them and the Pacific Ocean seems to lie patiently in wait, a tableau to be either noticed or not noticed depending on the comings and goings of the day. The house looks modest, though it probably isn’t. The deck wood looks salted and ragged, possibly unsafe for standing on. The photograph is in black and white. That’s really the main thing about it. These people are living elegantly and (as is always said about Didion) coolly in black and white in a part of the world that often seems exhausted by its own colors. These people have it both ways, which is to say they have it all ways. Or at least that’s the myth.

  You could say I moved to Los Angeles in order to try to have a lot of things at once. I used to call L.A. “New York City with yards” but that doesn’t really cover it. It’s more that it’s a place where wildness and domestication are forever running into each other. It’s a place wh
ere coyotes sleep on lawn chairs and cross Sunset Boulevard in broad daylight. It’s a place where bears dip into swimming pools in the foothills. I love that about it, just as I love that it’s a place of invisibility. It’s a place of tall hedges and private pools and driving alone in your car, where no one knows if you’re crying. Los Angeles is where I learned that your ability to see is sometimes only as good as your willingness to go unseen.

  * * *

  Here is an L.A. story. Given some of the characters involved I suppose it could also be a New York story. But at the end of it I get in my car and drive home, which is pretty much the way every L.A. story ends. It’s a story very much in color and also very name-droppy—in fact, it is in many ways a string of names and nothing more—and for a long time I was reluctant to tell it publicly. But the person responsible for it is, sadly, no longer alive to scold me for indiscretion. Not that she probably would have. She’s the one whose motto (actually it was her mother’s motto) was “Everything is copy.”

  Nora Ephron was a friend and mentor to me. I use these terms proudly but also loosely, as she was a friend and mentor to dozens if not hundreds of other young female writers of roughly my generation and sensibility. When she died unexpectedly in the summer of 2012, we all seemed to come out of the woodwork like mistresses at the funeral of a raging yet irresistible philanderer, churning out paeans to her in any publication that would let us and sizing one another up as if saying, “She took you to lunch, too?” Even before then, I knew I was far from the first rung of Nora acolytes. We had lunch a few times, once or twice in New York (“Next time I’ll invite Joan to join us!”) and again once or twice in L.A., where on one occasion she told me to meet her at Fred Segal and, not realizing it had a restaurant, I loitered around the store for twenty minutes before figuring things out and rushing to the café, where, to my great shame, I’d kept her waiting.

  A movie producer Nora knew was seated at a nearby table and she introduced us. This was during the time when I was still going through the motions of trying to be a screenwriter, a venture Nora seemed eager to help with. Returning to our table, she said to me, “You are going to call him tomorrow and he will take a meeting with you and he will love you and you’ll do a project together and it will work.” She said things like this all the time—to just about everybody.

  Anyway, this is where the real story begins. I did not get it on tape, obviously, so I can’t claim to be telling it verbatim. But I’m recounting it to the best of my ability, and if at any time I appear to be exaggerating, you can be assured that I am not. This was no cartoon. This was live action all the way.

  One day Nora e-mailed and said she wanted to invite me to a party “for a games kind of thing.” Though I loathe games of just about any sort, I of course accepted the invitation. A short time later her assistant faxed me the directions to her house, which included a map and also instructions to bring a written list of objects or titles or names that were linked in some fashion; for instance, A League of Their Own, Field of Dreams, The Natural, which are all movies about baseball. I spent no less than twenty hours working on my list, revising it endlessly, changing the theme multiple times, and just generally fretting about the party. I ended up with a list of rock bands that had birds in the name: the Eagles, the Yardbirds, A Flock of Seagulls, and so on. But that’s not really relevant to the story.

  When I arrived at Nora’s house there were only a handful of cars in the driveway—a Lexus or two, a Range Rover, some BMWs—and very few parked on the street. This surprised me, as I assumed it would be a large gathering. Otherwise, why in the world would I have made the cut? I rang the doorbell and Nora answered, greeting me warmly as always. Though she lived most of the time in New York, she was in L.A. directing the movie Bewitched, and the house, which I think she was renting with her husband, Nick Pileggi, was grand if also fairly modest in scale—a baby grand. She showed me into the living room, where about twenty people, drinks and hors d’oeuvres in hand, were standing around in small conversational huddles.

  These people included the following: Nicole Kidman, Meg Ryan, Steve Martin, Rob Reiner, Larry David, Arianna Huffington, and David Geffen. Others included the spouses or partners of these people, for instance Laurie David, who was still married to Larry at the time, and Steve Martin’s lovely young girlfriend and future wife, the former New Yorker fact-checker Anne Stringfield. There was a smattering of various producers and moguls I didn’t recognize, plus, of course, Nick Pileggi, a famed author and screenwriter in his own right. There was also a small dog, and some stealth hired hands in the kitchen.

  Nora introduced me to Nicole Kidman. The way she did this was to say, “Nicole, this is Meghan Daum. Meghan, this is Nicole Kidman.”

  Then she brought me over to Rob Reiner and did the same thing. Another guest pulled her away and I was left standing there with Rob Reiner, who seemed to be listing to the side in an effort to return to his previous conversation. He said nothing to me. I couldn’t think of one appropriate thing to say to him. Obviously I couldn’t ask what he did for a living or how he knew Nora. Everyone in the world knew he was a famous director and anyone with a scintilla of movie trivia knowledge knew that he went back with Nora at least as far as When Harry Met Sally, for which she wrote the script.

  “Do you live nearby?” I asked finally.

  “Kind of,” he said.

  “Have any trouble getting here?”

  “No,” he said.

  We stood there a little longer. Rob Reiner didn’t ask if I lived nearby or how I knew Nora or what I did for a living. He asked me nothing. I excused myself to get a drink.

  Clutching my wine, I scanned the room for anyone remotely approachable. Steve Martin. I walked over and said hello. More precisely, I walked over and said hello to Anne, who then made it okay to say hello to Steve. He was friendlier than Rob Reiner, though no doubt this was because of Anne, who I’d never met but who at least occupied the same social galaxy as I did—or at least she had before she went and realized the fantasy of every woman who ever majored in English or worked in publishing: to land a major movie star who also plays the banjo and writes Shouts and Murmurs columns for The New Yorker.

  Steve Martin had a weird little mustache. It turned out he was in the middle of shooting a remake of The Pink Panther, playing Inspector Clouseau, and couldn’t shave it off. Larry David was standing with him and I tried to talk to him, too, but his gaze soon shifted to some person or object behind me, registering the bored irritation of a wedding guest trapped next to someone’s mentally ill relative.

  Mercifully, Nora clanked a glass and announced that dinner was ready. She’d cooked everything herself: baked ham and green beans and salad. The food sat on the kitchen counter in giant aluminum pans and we were instructed to file through and serve ourselves. Out in the main room, the seating was haphazard, with guests spread out over several tables that had been pushed together at strange angles. The spots were getting snapped up rapidly and I grabbed one where I could, which turned out to be next to Meg Ryan. We said hello with maximum brevity and she proceeded to start a conversation with the guy on the other side of me. Like just about everyone else, they were talking politics. Weeks earlier, George W. Bush had been elected to a second term. They were very distraught about this. At the other end of the table, Rob Reiner was booming with indignation about voting booth fraud. Arianna Huffington was gesturing wildly as though debating someone on a talk show. Meg Ryan and her friend were in deep discussion about how best to go after the Bush administration for war crimes. When I piped up, if only to lessen the awkwardness of our seating arrangement, they gave no indication of hearing me.

  I never thought I’d say this, but the words “now we’re going to divide into teams and play charades” filled me with indescribable relief. Nora told us to get out our lists and drop them in a hat that was being passed around. Then she explained that this was a special kind of charades called “running charades.”

  “It’s much more fun than
regular charades,” she said.

  “So what you’re saying, then,” said Steve Martin, “is that it’s sort of fun.” He said this neither loudly nor quietly, though few seemed to hear him in any case.

  We broke into teams, each of which was assigned a captain. Rob Reiner was ours and he explained the rules, which essentially involved trying to elicit as many correct answers as quickly as possible. The clues were the lists, meaning someone would stand up and act out every item on it—the Eagles, the Yardbirds, A Flock of Seagulls—until the theme was identified. Then they’d move on to another list. The first team to work through all the lists was the winner.

  Rob Reiner was a taskmaster. “Let’s go! Let’s go!” he bellowed while we flailed around trying to convey titles such as The Kiss of the Spider Woman and The Crying Game (it seemed almost everyone had brought in lists of movies) only to be met with shouts of “A Beautiful Mind!” and “Boogie Nights!” I couldn’t help but notice that Anne and I and a few of the other nonactors were in heavier pantomime rotation than the professional performers in the room, namely Nicole Kidman, who had confessed early on that charades “is not my forté” and was now sitting on an ottoman in the corner, seemingly trying to avoid notice. Which is of course a fruitless endeavor if you are Nicole Kidman.