by Alice Bolin
In her nonfiction, Didion resists the popular narrative of the entertainment industry’s sordidness, insisting of young Hollywood in the seventies that “the average daily narcotic intake is one glass of a three-dollar Mondavi white and two marijuana cigarettes shared by six people.” But Play It As It Lays seems to send a different message: there is plenty of the degeneracy we expect from pictures of Hollywood excess, like the sex life of Maria and Carter’s friends Helene and BZ, who indulge in swinging, group sex, S&M, and voyeurism. Like Rodrick’s article, but at a more fundamental level, Play It As It Lays is about the deal: Didion contemplates the existential gamble we undertake in our daily struggles, as we all strive, in the end, toward nothing but nothingness. And like in Grigoriadis’s article, it is very easy to become distracted by the woman at the novel’s center: Maria’s clothes, her jet-setting, her lounging by the pool, and her self-destruction that can seem like just one more indulgence. Lohan and Spears and Maria are all being used to sell a story—just like Dateline uses the smiling faces of its victims—and they are selling a story about the way we sell ourselves stories. That’s what I didn’t understand before I moved to L.A.: that the killings both literal and figurative did not just coexist but depended on each other, that what most people profit off of is human pain, and here I am, selling my own.
If an analogue for Play It As It Lays can be found in Didion’s nonfiction, it is her classic essay “The White Album,” in which Didion, describing a personal experience of failing mental health in the late sixties, decides that her own associative break might actually have been an appropriate response to societal stimuli. She quotes from her own psychiatric report:
It is as though she feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure, a conviction which seems to push her further into a dependent, passive withdrawal. In her view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure.
In this state of withdrawal, she recalls experiences “devoid of any logic save that of the dreamwork.”
As with Maria’s “blank tape” mind, imprinted with sensory detritus, so Didion writes, “All I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no ‘meaning’ beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.” No plot or narrative, just a jumble of strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended images that, when viewed in montage, say nothing.
Didion was preoccupied during this period with high-profile Hollywood murders, especially the killings committed by Charles Manson and his followers. It seems that murder stories inspire Didion with a special dread: attempting to lay thematic order over dumb chaos and cruelty starkly and distastefully reveals the cheapness of narrative. Didion asks Linda Kasabian, star witness for the prosecution in the Manson trial, about the events that led to her involvement with the Manson Family and their monstrous crime spree that left six people dead: “Everything was to teach me something,” Kasabian replied. This sort of odd and oddly self-centered conclusion is all that can be created out of so much destruction.
“The White Album” meditates on a haunting “house blessing” that hung in Didion’s mother-in-law’s house: it concluded, “And bless each door that opens wide, to stranger as to kin.” The verse “had on [Didion] the effect of a physical chill” because it seemed like “the kind of ‘ironic’ detail” that appears in murder stories. In Didion’s imaginative dread, it was ironic and at the same time fitting that a proclamation of goodwill and trust toward outsiders might preside over the violent betrayal of that trust. This is certainly the kind of detail that episodes of Dateline hang on. Didion at the time lived in a decaying mansion in an increasingly dangerous area of Hollywood. It had become what one of Didion’s acquaintances called “a senseless killing neighborhood,” where they did not bless the door that opened wide.
Didion and her family were renting the mansion only until zoning changes allowed its owners to tear it down and build high-rise apartments. “It was precisely this anticipation,” Didion writes, “of imminent but not exactly immediate destruction that lent the neighborhood its particular character.” This anticipation is the truth of Los Angeles existence writ small, that tenuousness stemming from the city’s endless development and apocalyptic weather. But of course, ultimate destruction is also the only real truth of capital-E Existence. What strikes me in Didion’s craft is not only her ethical grappling with narrative but the technical difficulty of making stories out of characters like Maria who are so solitary. When I think of the loneliest time of my life, it is a queasy loop recording. In my early days in Los Angeles, I did the same things over and over again—walked to the lake, rode the bus, lost my wallet, bought a coconut ice pop—and everything seemed connected, because nothing was. There was no story, because there were no other people.
The other notable locus of raw material for Play It As It Lays in Didion’s nonfiction is her 1965 essay “On Morality,” in which she searches for a useful definition of morality in a motel room in Death Valley. Didion describes a car accident on the highway between Las Vegas and Death Valley in which a young man was killed and his girlfriend was seriously injured. Didion speaks to the nurse who drove the young woman 185 miles to the nearest doctor, and whose husband kept watch over the young man’s body all night. “You can’t just leave a body on the highway,” the nurse says. “It’s immoral.” Didion respects this definition of morality because its application is precise: “She meant that if a body is left alone for even a few minutes on the desert,” Didion writes, “the coyotes close in and eat the flesh.” In Play It As It Lays, Maria’s mother dies in a car accident in the desert, and the coyotes get to her first.
The action in Play It As It Lays moves very intentionally from the city to the desert: a cleansed landscape that is dangerous, absent, and elemental. Maria grew up in the desert, in a settlement called Silver Wells that her father, a true western prospector, developed to capitalize on the traffic from a highway that was never built. Silver Wells became a ghost town; both Maria’s mother and her home are subsumed by the desert. This helps explain Maria’s infatuation with nothingness. In the beginning of the novel, when she is being analyzed in a psychiatric hospital, she writes “NOTHING APPLIES” in response to her doctors’ questions. “What does apply, they ask later,” Maria says, “as if the word ‘nothing’ were ambiguous.” Toward the end of the novel, “nothing” looms with mystical importance. “Tell me what matters,” BZ asks her. “Nothing,” Maria replies. “Tell me what you want,” Carter says to her. “Nothing,” Maria replies.
This nihilism seems to contradict the gambler’s optimism Maria learned from her father, who raised her to believe “that what came in on the next roll would always be better than what went out on the last.” For Maria and her companions, the desert strips life down to its most basic meaning: that is, no meaning. This is why Maria allows BZ to commit suicide, a decision that forms the climax of the novel. He desired nothingness, and he reached out for it. What could be more natural? But if the answer is nothing, there is more than one imperative to be found within it. Optimism and nihilism—and city and desert, and murder and suicide—are more of the entwined opposites supporting Didion’s vision of existence. As movies and dreams are one, as pulp and literature, as development and destruction, so for Maria the idealism of the gambler is the deepest form of cynicism. Maria says that her father taught her to see life as a crap game. “It goes as it lays, don’t do it the hard way,” she would hear him say in her mind. It is clear that the real estate and motion picture deals that built Los Angeles—the giant casino of the entertainment industry that will trade on every murder and mentally ill child star—have truly made something out of nothing, of a desert city that will be desert again, from ash to ash returning.
Maria doesn’t commit suicide, deciding instead to keep going, empowered by her intimacy with nothingness, treating life like the gamble that it is. She ha
s found it necessary to excise the sentimentality from her life, those lies that form the connective tissue between events, that make our perception like a movie rather than a cutting-room experience: the story. “Fuck it, I said to them all, a radical surgeon of my own life,” Maria says. “Never discuss. Cut.” She is cutting the same narratives and received truths that Didion rejects in her motel room in Death Valley in “On Morality,” when her mind resists abstraction and “veers inflexibly toward the particular.” I had started collecting my own particulars as I sat by Echo Park Lake and read Didion, and weren’t they, in their own way, cinematic? The old people I saw sitting on a piece of cardboard by the lake, hugging; the dragonfly fumbling to escape the nets covering the lily pads; the married couple on Dateline who named their house Happy Camp Ranch before the husband killed the wife. Maria insists that these kinds of shots and snatches of dialogue are “not a movie,” but I disagree: What is film but the most disjointed art form there is, a collection of images edited together in jagged succession? Once I left my cell phone on my bedside table while I sat by the lake all day. I came home to several text messages from my mom saying that my dad had fallen off his bike and broken a rib. They were keeping him in the hospital overnight to monitor him. Was this the moment I, the auteur of my own life, had waited for, the one that explained my dread? When you are out of reach, that’s when the danger catches up to your family. But in the tank-top weather beneath the leaning palm trees, as I watched the ducks and pedal boats and lotus blossoms, my character of myself wondered, and I did, too: Was this my fault, did I cause it to happen?
The Dream
In the spring of my first year in L.A., I would walk a mile and a half north from my apartment in Koreatown to Santa Monica Boulevard and the strange oasis of Hollywood Forever Cemetery. I would often talk to my mom on the phone when I went there, wandering so fretfully that I would get lost among the graves. Hollywood Forever is sixty acres in the middle of East Hollywood behind the Paramount lot. In fact, Paramount bought its land from the park in the early twentieth century, when it was still Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery. It’s a tourist destination, famous for housing stars like Rudolph Valentino and Iron Eyes Cody and two of the Ramones. Legendary director Cecil B. DeMille is buried with his wife, Constance, in a pair of giant Arthurian tombs. Tyrone Power’s grave quotes from Hamlet, the “Good night, sweet prince” speech, of course.
But the fancy pedigree of its inhabitants is not immediately apparent on entering. It contains a historic Jewish burial ground, Beth Olam, and the rows of monuments with non-famous Jewish names and Stars of David were the first ones I noticed. The cemetery is very close to Little Armenia, and there are large sections of granite markers with Armenian names and etchings of the dead in their Sunday best staring out unnervingly. Many of the monuments are truly old, from before the birth of the Los Angeles motion picture industry, when Los Angeles meant something completely different.
At times my eye would catch on a large or ornate monument (this is irritating because it is, by design, the rich exercising their control even after death) or a famous name, but the overall feeling there is unlike gawking down the Hollywood Walk of Fame. As in most cemeteries, chaos reigns in Hollywood Forever—the graves go in every direction, so crowded in some places that they resemble some sort of long-term storage, as if jumbled together there only until they are moved to their real plots. Peacocks swagger around the grounds, indifferent to visitors. Hollywood Forever is quirky and beautiful and more than the celebrity it is known for, just like Los Angeles.
Jules Roth, the crook owner of Hollywood Memorial from 1939 until his death in 1998, allowed it to fall into shameful disrepair, its crematorium forced to shut down in 1974 after the botched cremation of Mama Cass Elliot. In 1998 two young developers, Tyler and Brent Cassity, bought Hollywood Memorial and renamed and rebranded it, focusing on making a center for cultural programs like concerts and summer movies. There the audience scans itself for famous faces and during intermissions can seek out famous names in the confused rows of graves.
But is that what Hollywood Forever is about? From the beginning, I had trouble reconciling my daily experience of Los Angeles—as a young and changing city; as green and mountainous; as incredibly ethnically diverse, with a culture and population that is predominantly Latino—with the sun-bleached, valley-girlish, suburban sprawl-ish, cultureless, entertainment-industry glamourous idea I had of it before I moved there. Is this cemetery about celebrity? Is it about Los Angeles Judaism, about the city’s ethnic enclaves, about its turn-of-the-century oligarchy? Does this depend on which iteration of the cemetery you believe—the bankrupt, shambolic Hollywood Memorial or the hip and cultured Hollywood Forever? Do these distinctions even apply, or is each just a version of the same story, the same history that built Los Angeles and allows it to continue? As with everything in Los Angeles, I’m learning, objects in the mirror are always closer than they appear.
Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale is spacious and sprawling, five times the size of Hollywood Forever, styled as an English country estate. I’ve been there only once, on a freak 100-degree day in April, having been unwholesomely initiated into the Los Angeles way of death after so many afternoons in Hollywood Forever. When I entered its wrought-iron gates—the largest in the world, the cemetery claims—I saw rolling hills of grass unfurling from the main drive. As I approached, I was startled by the rows of bronze plaques against the green. That is what Forest Lawn is designed to be: the kind of cemetery where one is surprised by graves.
I walked the grounds for a few hours, wandering through the cemetery’s oldest graves, many of them bulky and embellished, from before the park’s look was streamlined: since the middle of the twentieth century, everyone, no matter who they are, gets a uniform bronze marker. I visited the park’s walled gardens, also filled with graves, and its bizarre themed sections, including, chillingly, Babyland, where infants are buried. It is true that many of the twentieth century’s greatest stars are buried at the park, but they aren’t luring tourists like Hollywood Forever: Michael Jackson, Clark Gable, and Jean Harlow are all memorialized in elite sections of the cemetery’s mausoleum that are not open to the public. I was so overwhelmed by Forest Lawn’s scale and the day’s heat that I staggered straight from the cemetery to an Atwater Village bar, makeup and sunscreen streaking down my face.
As Ben Ehrenreich writes in his masterly Los Angeles magazine investigation of the business of dying in L.A., “The End: What Really Happens When You Die?,” “Los Angeles holds a special place in the history of death.” This is largely because of the fascination (and awe and disgust) Forest Lawn has elicited in its visitors. From the time it was acquired in 1912 by Dr. Hubert L. Eaton—known as “the Builder”—it was designed to be “as unlike other cemeteries as sunshine is unlike darkness.” Eschewing the chaotic development of most cemeteries, the concept for Forest Lawn sprang fully formed from Eaton’s imagination: from the replicas of English churches and reproductions of Leonardo’s sculptures to the cemetery’s system of zoning, “a rigid real estate hierarchy,” says Ehrenreich, “that reflects L.A.’s own.” This is integral to the cemetery’s business model, as it manufactures a demand for plots in certain areas of the park and so justifies their exorbitant price tags.
One of the park’s most enthusiastic and horrified explorers was the English novelist Evelyn Waugh, who called it “a completely unique place—the only thing in California that is not a copy of something else.” (Never mind all of the architectural and artistic imitation it contains.) Waugh came to Hollywood in 1947 to develop an adaptation of his novel Brideshead Revisited for MGM Studios. He found the movie industry and the United States generally to be completely distasteful, but he took perverse pleasure in learning about Glendale’s giant cemetery (“morticians are the only people worth knowing,” he wrote to a friend) and the American funeral industry. His short novel about Forest Lawn, The Loved One, is one of the most brutal and hilarious satires ever written about
American culture. In it, Waugh invents unholy marvels of American engineering like Kaiser’s Stoneless Peaches, which taste to the story’s British poet hero, Dennis Barlowe, like “a ball of damp, sweet, cotton-wool.” Waugh also writes endlessly of the convenience and indistinguishability of American women, so that they seem to manifest from the same American mania for mass production. Dennis wonders as he stares at a woman’s leg, “Which came first in this strange civilization . . . the foot or the shoe, the leg or the nylon stocking?”
Forest Lawn, or as Waugh fictionalized it, Whispering Glades, is a pure and disturbing expression of this American sterility and consumerism. Waugh mimics the cemetery’s relentlessly positive and euphemistic corporate language. The Builder is figured in The Loved One as “the Dreamer.” “Let me explain the Dream,” is how the Mortuary Hostess begins her discussion of funeral arrangements with Dennis. Corpses are known as “Loved Ones,” so a makeup artist says to an embalmer, “Here is the strangulated Loved One for the Orchid Room.” Waugh was particularly appalled by the prevalence of embalming in the United States. As Ehrenreich points out, the draining of a corpse’s bodily fluids and its preservation with formaldehyde “is practiced nowhere else in the world with the near universality that it achieved in North America.” For Waugh, embalming nullified any memento mori, as “the body does not decay; it lives on, more chic in death than ever before, in its indestructible class A steel and concrete shelf.” This was the true horror of Forest Lawn: its cheery but enfeebled idea of death, one designed to appeal to the American capitalist. “Dr. Eaton is the first man to offer eternal salvation at an inclusive charge as part of his undertaking service,” wrote Waugh.