by A M Homes
The Coachella Valley is all about golf. There is an enormous amount of golf played here on every level, fifteen championship courses with more on the way. They’ve now expanded, bringing in tennis as a second sport—but in the end, out here it will always be the golf.
At La Quinta, there is the sense of being in a Mexican hacienda, the adobe houses clustered like a small village, the Santa Rosa Mountains looming in the background. There is a hardness to this desert, it’s not the soft sand of beaches; it’s lunar, cold, unyielding. In the distances are desert grasses, mesquite trees, sagebrush, and under my feet the lushest, most surrealistically perfect Kodacolor-hued green grass I’ve ever seen.
Palm Springs and the surrounding towns are odd places, the creative life of the valley feels Stepford-like, mute, dangerous in a whole other way. Do they just play golf forever? You can’t help but tune out the rest of the world, can’t help but slow down and get into the rhythm of the place. However, in a moment of panic, in my need not to be muted, I hijacked a golf cart and took it for a long ride at dusk. Over the green, over the mounds, around the edges of the sand traps, riding curving hills of the golf course—it was fantastic. In the distance were men finishing their games, swinging long and hard. I watched the balls disappearing into the sky, my eye adjusting like the shutter of a camera searching to find it against the darkness. I felt like a ranger in an African game park—as a roadrunner zipped by, like a kid on an amusement park ride, the hills and mountains at the edge of the course, like papier-mâché decorations, movie-set boulders. I am a hunter, tracking the small white golf balls as they fly through the air, with none of the grace of a bird, like Mario Andretti tooling along at ten miles an hour, taking the turns with a certain devil-may-care glee. I drive around until the last of the golfers have gone home, until it is dark, until they are summoning me back, with two orange flashlights, the kind you use to direct an airplane to the gate. I feel like a cowboy. The cart is my horse, I am riding the Wild, Wild West.
When the rain stops I drive to Joshua Tree. It is hauntingly beautiful, there is snow on the ground even though the air is warm. One has the sense that magical things happen here. If you were from another planet this would be a good place to land. The surrounding community is very rough-hewn, every man for himself. There is an extreme flatness to the desert—midday there are no shadows, it is like movie lighting, like a correction that bleaches everything out, that encourages the eye to go beyond seeing, beyond the full light of day into a kind of blindness, acceptance.
There are two images of Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage that will always be with me, the first a 1961 photograph of retired President Dwight D. Eisenhower barbecuing in La Quinta, the second a 1979 photograph by Joel Sternfeld, “After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California.” The image is of a sinkhole, a cave in the Earth having given way at the edge of a house. You can see the pavement and where the ground has fractured, split, fallen away, revealing striations of the Earth. A car lies upside down at the bottom of the pit. There are also broken pipes, and the sense that more of what is above ground, the house, garage, the palm trees, could give way at any minute.
In Rancho Mirage, the streets are named after former Presidents and celebrities, Gerald Ford and Bob Hope Drives. The Annenbergs’ property is defined by a long pink wall, confining the greenest grass I’ve ever seen; the combination of the pink wall and the green grass vibrates more intensely than a Mark Rothko painting, perhaps as intensely as a Lily Pulitzer dress. Bob Hope’s house, designed in 1972 by John Lautner, looms over the edge of a cliff, visible from Highway 111. It is like a spaceship or half-deflated football, but there’s no way to get a closer look—the road up is gated. In fact, all of the residential communities in the valley are gated. Given that no one is here, I’m not actually sure what they’re locking in or who they are keeping out. Even the trailer parks are gated. Locals say they used to see Bob Hope in the grocery store really late at night, pushing a cart up and down the aisles. The Betty Ford Center is also in Rancho Mirage and seems like a perfect place to dry out—it is about as low-stress as it gets while maintaining a pulse. Oddly there are an enormous number of dialysis centers—interesting because dialysis is about water, about the ability to make water, to keep the system clean. All over the town there are dialysis centers and patches of bright grass. Despite the fact that this is a desert there seems to be no shortage of water. And here, unlike in Los Angeles, there are old people. They step out of the darkness of their condo units, of their trailers, their low-rise apartments into the broad shadowless daylight like living fossils, like something from The Night of the Living Dead. The town is filled with them, exiled Angelenos who long ago crossed the Hollywood age limit of forty and came out here to gently roam. They are leathery and heat seeking, desperate to stay warm, to stay hot, until finally they combust and turn into small heaps of ash.
I am in the desert for two days and my panic, my need for stimulation, continues to grow. I am discovering that I am a city person, I am a person starved for social interaction. I have run away in error. I call the Chateau Marmont and beg to come home. I tell them I will never do it again—it was a mistake even thinking I could leave, if only for a day or two. I feel like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, clicking my heels together—“There’s no place like home.” When I get back to L.A. my old room is taken, they have to put me in another room for a couple of days—the bellman is laughing as he hands over the key. I have been given an enormous suite, with a full-size dining room, a kitchen, a living room that could host fifty, and wraparound terraces that overlook what used to be the Marlboro Man. What used to be the smoke from the Marlboro Man’s cigarette is now the foam out of the top of a beer bottle; every few minutes it goes off.
I am so relieved to be home, I unpack. I put my clothing in the drawers, my toiletries in the bathroom cabinet. I think I’ll stay a while.
CHAPTER EIGHT
California Dreaming
There is a Los Angeles of my childhood, of my fantasies. It is a small town where everyone is famous, where everyone knows each other—they’re all friends. It is classically suburban, the houses look slightly more ornate than something seen in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. It’s the kind of place where Lucille Ball invites Doris Day over for dinner and Doris Day brings Kirk Douglas and someone goes strolling down the sidewalks of Beverly Hills carrying a tuna noodle casserole in a Pyrex dish. The men wear suits and ties, the women wear hats and gloves. There are no race problems, no poverty, everything is rich and green. Life is perfect. There is always a party and you’re always invited—everyone loves everyone. It never happened. Or it did happen and it’s a movie called The Truman Show?
The Los Angeles of my childhood is about images passed on through magazines, movie magazines, gossip magazines, Rona Barrett’s Hollywood. Barrett was the blonde doyenne of the single scoop, the sequel to Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, a one-woman industry turning out a stream of magazines. As an entertainment reporter, she used to do short spots from Hollywood. I still remember the distinctly New York, knowing smirk of her voice. She is now retired and recently launched a line of lavender products from her ranch in Santa Barbara.
Los Angeles was star maps, Ray-Ban glasses, convertibles, surfer boys and girls. It was pictures, lots of pictures, stars being immortalized on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a tourist attraction started by the local Chamber of Commerce in 1961. I remember seeing movie stars down on their knees, crouched on the terrazzo of the walkway, bent as low as they could go in order to get their face and their star in the same frame.
It was a place where dreams came true, where heads of studios were big men who barked orders into the telephone, where directors dressed in cardigans to go on the set and assistants called out the magic words—“quiet on the set, rolling, action, and cut.” It was a place where rough men smoked cigars, called women “broads” and threw their money around. And any which way, it was always romantic, it was always vibrant and interesting. The movie stars were c
lean-cut; later the standard loosened up a bit, but still remained glamorous and certainly no movie stars advertised the unshaved, unmade-bed look that rules today.
It was about Hollywood, old Hollywood, a Hollywood that for the most part was already long gone by the time I was first tuning in. The classic restaurant the Brown Derby on Vine Street survived until 1980—it’s now a parking lot. Ciro’s, the infamous nightclub, is now the Comedy Store. The Schwab’s Drugstore on the corner of Crescent Heights and Sunset Boulevard, frequently falsely identified as the place where Lana Turner was discovered though it is the place where Harold Arlen sat at the counter and wrote “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” is now a Virgin Megastore. Across the street and down the block from the Hollywood Walk of Fame is Fredrick’s of Hollywood, the trashy lingerie store that boasts a lingerie museum. If you can allow yourself to get into a little low-level sleaze, it’s quite amusing. There’s Musso and Frank Grill, among the oldest of restaurants, a place where actors and writers used to hang out, among them Nathanael West, author of the classic Hollywood novel The Day of the Locust.
In the Hollywood of my childhood, there was no drug addiction, no alcoholism, no plastic surgery gone wrong. Everything was youth and beauty, high hopes and pearly white smiles. It was not a city tinged with thousands of tragic deaths, suicides, murders, “accidents.” It had none of the shallow, over-inflated, self-centered culture of users and abusers. It wasn’t a town where no one says no to your face, a town where it is hard to be alone and even worse to be lonely.
In a town obsessed with youth, a culture where twenties are prime, thirties are starting to lose their luster, forties are practically over the hill, and fifties are positively geriatric, I wondered what it was like to actually be old. It occurred to me that I’d never seen any old people in Los Angeles, not on the streets, not in restaurants, not shopping, not even shrunken down and hovering over the edge of the steering wheel, tooling down Sunset a little light on the gas.
With the exception of a few lizardy old ladies discreetly tucked into the booths of the Hotel Bel Air at lunch time—faces tight as a drum, hands now gnarly claws—it is as if old people are banned from the city of Los Angeles.
So I went looking for them. I found depressing two-story “retirement homes” showing no signs of life mixed in among commercial enterprises on very busy streets. I saw community-based senior citizen centers offering discount $1.50 lunches populated by a few downtrodden men who’d long ago lost their dentures.
At best, if you’re an ancient celebrity, they trot you out for special occasions, but even that is done with great caution and at arm’s length.
Hollywood celebrates immortality, the preservation of youth, the buying and selling of wrinkle-free icons. The phrase “senior citizen” connotes someone who has lived here for more than five years—it’s a death-denying culture.
It’s got to be hard to age in a city panicked by history, by anything with too long of a back story, by antiquity, by cracks in the surface—the city itself is all about surface: smooth, unblemished.
Face-lifts, ass-lifts, tummy tucks—in Los Angeles a body is remade on a regular basis; people go in for a little work the way folks in other cities might take the car in for an oil change. Angelenos are forever on crazy antiaging diets, injecting themselves with all kinds of vitamins, Botox, collagen, lasering themselves back to their prime, transplanting their hair, ingesting potions. There are doctors harvesting fat from people’s rear ends and injecting it into their faces, anything not to look old, or better yet not to even look one’s age.
Among seniors there is an enormous invisibility factor. Until he fell and broke his hip a couple of years ago, former President Reagan was reportedly often taken for walks along the Venice Beach Boardwalk—no one noticed.
The very nature of human existence in Hollywood compounds the problem. It’s not a city of casual friendships, of easy access to resources. You don’t see people going out for a little fresh air—no one walks around the neighborhood, except the cleaning ladies to and from the bus stop. Think about what it means to get older, to have a limited income, to not be as physically able, to live in a city with poor public transportation. There is a subway in Los Angeles, but it is a joke; more than ninety percent of people I asked didn’t know about it—“You mean the monorail at Disneyland, right?” Los Angeles is an isolating place for anyone, but all the more so for seniors who can’t drive.
When thinking about Los Angeles, I kept thinking I’d write about the obsession with age and gravity-defying treatments and perhaps spend some time in a plastic surgeon’s office, but then it occurred to me that I really wanted to find the old folks and more specifically, the old folks of Hollywood. I remembered that every year on the Academy Awards they make mention of the Motion Picture and Television Fund Retirement Community, which used to be known as the Old Actors’ Home. I found that the fund dates back to 1921, when Hollywood was still a small pioneer town and the organization was known as the Motion Picture Relief Fund, the idea behind it being that the motion picture community needed to take care of its own. Originally headed up by top stars like Mary Pickford, the fund raised money to be distributed on a “relief first, questions second” basis to cover emergency expenses such as rent, medical assistance, funerals, and help people find work, etc. Contributions to the fund became a payroll deduction in 1931 equal to a half percent of earnings. Many of those who came to Hollywood in the early days left behind families in the East and Midwest and either never married or had marriages that failed. This left them all the more on their own and socially and financially dependent upon the Hollywood community.
The main campus of the retirement village is located on a forty-eight-acre spread in Woodland Hills, and at this point is part of an extended health-care network serving the entire motion picture and entertainment industry—from children to seniors. The retirement facilities include independent and assisted living. The Country House, with its Jeanette McDonald Dining Room and Douglas Fairbanks Lounge, is for those who are able to manage on their own, as is the new Fran and Ray Stark Villa. On the grounds there is the Wasserman Koi Pond, the Roddy McDowall Rose Garden, exercise facilities in the Katzenberg Pavilions and church services in the John Ford Chapel. The Frances Goldwyn Lodge is an assisted-living facility and there’s also Harry’s Haven, an Alzheimer’s unit, given by Kirk and Anne Douglas and named in honor of Kirk’s father.
One thinks of retirement homes as halfway houses between living and dying. It is a difficult decision for the retiree and his or her family to move into such a facility. We are people who pride ourselves on independence, and while aging may seem to be a universal issue, it’s in many ways a very American issue, reflecting the structure of the society and the family, disparate, fractured. We don’t think of the elderly as the wise, the leisured, nor do we acknowledge the importance of the history they hold, their role in the life cycle, their ability to be role models for the next generation.
My visual fantasy/nightmare of the actors home was rolling farmland where aged actors and actresses roamed in costumes reflecting their heyday, cowboys in western wear, frontier ladies in bustle skirts, a few hepcats from the 1950s with painted-on hair, all of them put out to pasture like retired racehorses. In reality, it initially appears to be much like any other retirement community, a series of low buildings built and expanded over the years. But what’s significantly different about this facility is the sense of community. And the heat—there is an otherworldly quality to the heat, the baking sun. If you’ve ever noticed, old people have a hard time regulating their temperature—they’re always cold, always needing a sweater—but not here. It’s a kind of nirvana in shirt sleeves.
Everyone here has something in common—the industry—whether as prop men, costumers, camera operators, actors and actresses; theirs is a shared experience. There are frequent screenings of new releases in their movie theater and guest visits by industry heavyweights. And at a time in one’s life when long-term memory functions
better than short, when the impetus to make new connections is dwindling and where there is comfort to be had in the past, folks here are happy to swap stories of the way it used to be and, equally important, continue to feel that they are part of the active community.
I met for tea with four residents, Virginia McDowall, the sister of Roddy McDowall, who curiously enough had been at the 1941 groundbreaking of the facility shortly after she and Roddy had arrived in California. In her droll English accent, Virginia shared her magnificent story of coming to America by boat.
Hal Riddle, a character actor who has a schoolboy’s enthusiasm, radiated the thrill of having lucked into something great. A movie fan since he was a boy, he used to write away for autographed pictures from his childhood home in Kentucky. We were joined in the dining room by Tommy Farrell and his wife Bobbi—Tommy is the son of movie star Glenda Farrell and essentially grew up on movie sets, having had a significant career of his own as an actor, in films, television, night clubs, vaudeville—you name it, Tommy did it.
I had hoped to talk with them about growing old—interestingly the subject never came up. We talked about everything else—their careers, who they worked with, how they made their way to Hollywood, what the scene used to be like. The fact that the subject of age never became part of the conversation meant to me that they don’t think of themselves as old, they think of themselves first and foremost as actors and they weren’t going to let me forget it.