by David Rakoff
The tour ends, as such things do, in the gift shop, where we see two old projectors from Grauman’s, which are kind of cool, and also two wax figures of Chinese coolies that once stood in the theater lobby. Rubbing them used to be considered good luck. Our guide then lets us in on a secret. “There are many people who come to the theater and see how authentic it is and are then under the mistaken impression that Sid Grauman was himself Chinese. He wasn’t,” he says, disabusing us of an apparently oft-held Hollywood myth. “He was Irish and Jewish.” Who, I think, are the genius demographers who think someone named Sid Grauman was Chinese? But my unspoken outrage is drowned out by “Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch,” which blasts over the gift-shop sound system throughout his talk.
A little spent, I return to my hotel. Luckily, I am staying right across the street at the beautiful Hollywood Roosevelt, a lovely building erected in 1927. A cool, dark, Spanish-colonial folly of a place with a central lobby that has a tile floor and a splashing fountain, it’s like Norma Desmond’s house in Sunset Boulevard if she started taking in guests. The similarities don’t stop at the architecture, actually. There are moments where it distinctly feels like things are being run by a delusional Gloria Swanson. The frustrations are minute but widespread: the wooden ledge that runs the length of my room and doubles as my headboard is gray with dust and remains so throughout my stay. Every time I ask reception to call me a cab, I am told affable words to the effect of “Right away”; my request is then radioed out to one of the attendants in the driveway not twenty feet distant, indicating my imminent arrival out the door in, oh, about five seconds, along with a description of what I am wearing. I emerge from the hotel into a scrum of attendants with headsets and whistles, ready to be of service, and I am invisible. This happens over and over again. The sense one gets at the Roosevelt is that they have bigger fish to fry. Or cuter and younger fish, at any rate. The very first Academy Awards ceremony was held at the Roosevelt in 1929 and the hotel is once more at the burning center of movie-star currency. Young women in skinny jeans and stilettos, accompanied by their men in untucked striped oxford shirts and premium denim, flock each night to the Roosevelt’s bar, a hopping establishment called Teddy’s that, just prior to my arrival, had been embroiled in a minor scandal when the impresaria, “nightlife producer” Amanda Scheer Demme, was dismissed, ostensibly for allowing (I am shocked, shocked!) underage drinking by young celebrities. There were further accusations against Demme that she had made the actual guests of the hotel feel unwelcome at Teddy’s (again, permit my organs to rupture in surprise). Actually, I wouldn’t know since I cannot find the place no matter how many hallways I try. I can hear the thumping of the sound system each day starting at dusk. I enter many a disused ballroom thinking that this must be the way, but I still cannot tell you where it is. Does the Roosevelt have a gym? I have no idea. I do know there is a pool, apparently painted by David Hockney. I’ve seen pictures in magazines, and it’s quite pretty, plus the juxtapositional joke of Hockney applying paint to the very object he’s famous for rendering in paint is amusing, but again, no sign in the elevator telling me where it might be and staff members who can seem downright yeti-like in their elusiveness.
The exclusion I feel at the Roosevelt is not unlike living in the apartment directly beneath Valhalla, a feeling only amplified one morning when I go across the street to the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf to see Thor standing outside holding a latte. His helmet is a plastic rendition of beaten metal and animal horns, with a fall of synthetic flaxen hair sewn onto the inside edge. The locks spill down over his “bare” shoulders, in reality the sleeves of his costume, a shiny flesh-colored fabric. The musculature is sewn directly into the garment, meant to mimic the bulging biceps and ropey forearms of the Norse god of war. But the stitches around the pillowy inserts are visible, and the whole thing bags and wrinkles around his skinny arms. “You guys drinking later?” he asks his friends, his mouth a checkerboard of intact and missing teeth.
He could use the kind of makeover once promised in the Johnny Mercer song (“ … if you think that you can be an actor, see Mister Factor, He’d make a monkey look good. Within a half an hour, You’ll look like Tyrone Power, Hooray for Hollywood!), and he’d be in luck, because the original Max Factor makeup studio is just down the street. A perfect pink deco boîte of a building, picked out here and there with golden-plaster detailing of fabric swags, it is terribly chic and female and looks like an enormous jewel box from a Busby Berkeley number, whose lid might at any moment open to reveal five hundred pairs of legs dancing on a mirror-finish floor. To look around it is to smell pressed powder and Final Net with your eyes. The ancient woman who methodically takes my money and hands me back my change with a painstaking if glacial precision is still sporting a hairstyle straight out of Swing Time. She might well have been one of the marcelled beauties who paraded these halls back when it was still a salon. It has since been turned into the Hollywood History Museum, the ground floor concerning Max Factor’s specific role in the dream factory. A series of small rooms is devoted, respectively, to a different hair color and that shade’s most iconic star. The For Blondes Only room claims Lana Turner and Marilyn Monroe, among others. Brunettes boasts Liz Taylor as its figurehead. The For Redheads Only room loves Lucy, naturally. And then I come upon a room reserved for “Brownettes,” which is a new one on me and sounds like the affectionate name one might give a much loved and highly effective barbiturate. How fitting, then, that the Brownette for the ages is none other than Judy Garland.
I keep up the period perfection and take lunch at Musso and Frank, a little farther east. Opened in 1919, the restaurant makes an appearance in The Day of the Locust. The interior is a relief from the California sunshine outside, with dark-wood booths and a mural of a leafy New England in autumn. By all rights, I should order something authentically carnivorous and insouciant, like a rare steak and a gin martini, but it is midday in late spring, and I opt instead for a somewhat healthier Caesar salad with chicken, electively excluding myself from a true Musso and Frank experience. I speak too soon, because my waiter, Manuel, who has worked there for thirty-plus years, makes my salad from scratch right there at the bar, a courtly procedure involving a bowl wiped with a garlic clove, the flourished brandishing of a raw egg, and anchovy fillets. Throughout the theatrical preparation, Manuel continues his conversation with a woman sitting a few seats down, clearly a regular. The years have taken their toll and her back is curved over toward the wood of the bar, perhaps in a genuflecting tribute to the curling prawns in her cocktail. Osteoporosis hasn’t dampened her spirits any. Her laugh is freely and frequently unleashed. It is the sound of rocks in a blender, a granite smoothie.
An afternoon rain has dispersed the tourists along the street. The gray light smoothes out the edges and polishes the street beautifully. As evening approaches, I take a taxi (un–thank you, Roosevelt) to see friends. The green Hollywood Hills rise just to the north of Hollywood Boulevard and the cab winding its way through the curving roads of Laurel Canyon is an antidote to the clatter of the street. The houses aren’t the behemoth pleasure domes of Beverly Hills or Brentwood, but rather storybook sweet, with eaves overhung with flowering clematis. In the violet dusk, the vegetation seems to become an even more inviting velvet green, with the magenta bougainvillea and vivid red flowers of the bottlebrush trees standing out. It is all as calming and luxuriant as a Rousseau painting, the perfect break. When it is time to return later that night, the city lies just over the escarpment like a jeweled carpet. It seems so exciting that I can’t wait to get back down the hill.
———
When I first got here, I found the breadth of the names of those enshrined on the Walk of Fame unutterably depressing, with its embarrassment of people who are all but unrecognizable. Every step was a cruel reminder of the heartlessness of time and tide. For every Hedy Lamarr to make you recall what a brilliant, patent-holding beauty she was, there is a Barbara La Marr to keep you cognizant that someday you, too, wil
l be dead and the subject of a great, cosmic shrugging “Who?” (Barbara La Marr, “the Girl Who Was Too Beautiful,” best friend of ZaSu Pitts, one of the first in Hollywood to succumb to drugs in 1926. She was already dead more than thirty years before they even started the Walk.) But as the days pass and I spend more and more time with the pavement, I revise my opinion. I suppose the way to think of it is as if the pipe-fitters union was honoring one of its own. It’s just by happy accident that some of its members happen to be globally famous and recognizable. The custom has sprung up elsewhere—on Fashion Avenue in New York, I walk over Claire McCardell’s and Norman Norell’s plaques; in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, that borough’s native-born Ruby Stevens, better known as Barbara Stanwyck, has a paving stone among the greenery; on Toronto’s King Street is Canada’s Walk of Fame, about which ’nuff said. And in each place, the overriding sense one has is of, if not having intruded exactly, then at least being witness to something that ultimately doesn’t involve one. A Walk of Fame by its nature turns out to be a very local phenomenon.
I take one last stroll over to Vine on my last morning on the boulevard. Most of the businesses are still shuttered. The tourists have yet to arrive at Grauman’s. I pass by Dan Avey’s star once again. It is all of four days old but I see that it is patched. No doubt, it left the workshop patched. There, against the salmon pink of the five-pointed star, is an occlusion of darker red, like a bruise or the small beating heart of a tiny creature. There is an almost animal frailty in that blemish that makes me stop in my tracks for a minute. People have been coming out West with stars in their eyes for so long, and for just as long, some have returned whence they came, their hopes dashed. But if one’s dreams having to come true was the only referendum on whether they were beautiful, or worth dreaming, well then, no one would wish for anything. And that would be so much sadder.
III.
God’s Country
“Great swarms of bees will arise. Are you ignoring the signs?”
The fortune cookie is nothing more than a canny History Channel promotion for a special about Nostradamus, but it seems an eerie message to receive mere days before my departure for Utah. Perhaps I am grabbing at straws by ascribing wisdom to a cookie, but the forty-fifth state owes much of its history to fiery-eyed revelation and prophecy, and Deseret—the original pioneer name for the territory—was a neologism Joseph Smith coined in The Book of Mormon to mean “honeybee.” The beehive is even the state’s symbol.
If the lobby of my hotel is any indication, the end of October is an auspicious time to visit, with the air abuzz with omen and augury. Arriving past midnight, I am greeted by an elaborate Halloween display of a dry-ice fountain, skeins of cobweb, and cutouts of Dracula and Frankenstein, made all the more ghoulish by overhead fluorescent lighting, like the nurses’ station in a state hospital. My room is cheerfully located between the sixth-floor elevators. The springs of my bed wheeze. The elevator dings. The ice machine right outside my door rumbles forth its icy bounty, a steady tattoo that beats “Stay up! Stay up!” I am in a canvas that Edward Hopper never felt bummed out enough to paint.
Morning banishes the gloom. The air is sun-washed and pristine, carrying only a veil of haze from the California wildfires that have been raging for weeks. The lobby is full of genealogy tourists who have come to trace their family histories at the extensive Mormon archives. Utah, it seems, is where one comes to be found.
I join their happy ranks and follow them the few short blocks up to Temple Square, the spiritual and geographic heart of the city. A bride and groom hop up onto the stone ledge of a planter for the photographer, the better to capture the shining gold statue of the angel Moroni in the background. Moroni is the archangel of the faith, the prophet-warrior who gave Joseph Smith the golden plates that would eventually become The Book of Mormon. There are numerous couples in white dresses and tuxedoes marking their big day among the opulent glories of these world headquarters of the Latter-day Saints.
I begin in the South Visitors’ Center, a sparsely furnished, carpeted space as hushed as a high-end rehab facility. The bulk of the displays are about the extraordinary and arduous efforts of the early Mormon pioneers in building the temple. Huge, rough granite blocks were hewn by hand, transported one at a time over miles in wagons that often broke under the weight of the stone.
“The Latter Day Saints labored with faith for forty years to build the temple. A flawed initial foundation, the arrival of federal troops in 1858 … caused major delays.” (An oblique reference to the skirmish known as the Utah War when Washington, D.C., alarmed at the subversive and un-American practice of polygamy, sent soldiers in, replacing Mormon leader Brigham Young with Alfred Cumming as territorial governor.) Reading further, apparently the chief mason had his leg amputated and still managed to hobble the twenty-two miles to Temple Square and then climb the scaffold in order to carve the final, consecrating declaration HOLINESS TO THE LORD in the stone façade.
In his 1873 novel, Around the World in Eighty Days, Jules Verne sends Phileas Fogg and his valet, Passepartout, through Utah by train. There they encounter a man, dressed in the severe dark clothes of a clergyman, pasting flyers up and down the train. “Passepartout approached and read one of these notices, which stated that Elder William Hitch, Mormon missionary, taking advantage of his presence on train No. 48, would deliver a lecture on Mormonism in car No. 117, from eleven to twelve o’clock; and that he invited all who were desirous of being instructed concerning the mysteries of the religion of the ‘Latter Day Saints’ to attend.” Passepartout takes a seat among thirty listeners. The elder William Hitch begins his heated oration “in a rather irritated voice, as if he had been contradicted in advance. ‘I tell you that Joe Smith is a martyr, that his brother Hiram is a martyr, and that the persecutions of the United States Government against the prophets will also make a martyr of Brigham Young. Who dares to say the contrary?’ ” Hitch’s outrage is understandable. Verne was writing less than fifteen years after the Utah War. Brigham Young had been imprisoned by the U.S. government for polygamy just the previous October. By the end of the jeremiad, Passepartout is the only one left listening.
Nearly a century and a half later, the Mormons remain objects of suspicious scrutiny, a reputation stoked by the likes of lunatic-fringe polygamist leader, convicted rapist (and, it should be noted, non-Utahan) Warren Jeffs. Or by the fact that blacks were only admitted into the Mormon church in 1978 (a divine revelation of racial inclusion that coincided a little too tidily with the recruitment needs of the Brigham Young University football team, I am told). A sampling of some of the other things about the Latter-day Saints mentioned to me over the course of my time in Utah:
Polygamous houses are identifiable by the screening stands of cedars out front.
Mormon housewives will “accidentally” throw a red item of clothing into the washing machine, thus changing their garments—the ritual underclothing that comes in standard-issue white—pink.
There is a growing social problem in polygamous families where the patriarch—also known as the father—like a silverback gorilla whose sexual dominance is threatened, casts out the male children upon their reaching puberty. This is particularly common in households where some of the wives are young teenagers themselves. Facing homelessness, these adolescents fall under the care of the state or live in group homes, eking out livings as carpenters and cabinetmakers, part of the traditional LDS skill set.
The usual proscriptions against caffeine do not apply to Coca-Cola, since BYU’s board of trustees has a financial interest in the beverage company.
There is a higher-than-average incidence of homosexuality among Mormon men. (This tidbit was always accompanied by a hyperlink to a calendar of shirtless missionaries and, like many theories in the “Who’s gay?” phylum, almost invariably followed up with the super-scientific assessment that “Mormon boys are the hottest.”)
The best place to see polygamous families is at Costco, where the competitive pricing and m
ayonnaise in jars the size of fire hydrants makes it the obvious choice for a household with eighteen children. Perhaps I went to the wrong one. I see nobody resembling sister wives. But far more miraculous are the free eats. Unlike the eagle-eyed young foodies who dole out the samples in New York, where they essentially memorize your face, thus making going back for seconds nigh on impossible, Costco SLC employs a (barely) standing army of the geriatric, the halt, and the mentally not-all-entirely-there, who man stations in their red uniforms and hand out free pizza, chiles rellenos, penne with chicken in “a quattro formaggio sauce,” and never once give you the fisheye, even if you return in under a minute for another pleated paper cup of those excellent canned Indian River grapefruit segments.
Some of this is demonstrably true (Warren Jeffs was a polygamist and he is in jail; if social services is taking case histories from boys being thrown out of their homes, then QED), and some of it is essentially unverifiable (without proper LDS identification, you cannot even see the garments for sale in a Salt Lake City department store, white or pink). But it is the tenacity of and the pleasure taken in disseminating the whispered chatter that is remarkable. Prior to my trip, I did not fail to receive a joking “Don’t let them get you!” warning from everyone I spoke to, as if I were marching into the waiting maw of a cult.
To understand why the Mormon faith might be routinely tarred with the weird brush—and also why it should not—one need but visit the North Visitors’ Center. The lower level is an unassailable and impressive testament to present-day Mormon initiatives, both local and global, for fighting hunger and doing good works. There are the requisite photographs of beautiful third-world children enjoying some all-too-rare nutrition or inoculation, although it is an unassuming pallet of canned food labeled DESERET INDUSTRIES, stretch-wrapped and ready for airlift, that packs the poignant punch.