The Varnished Untruth

by Stephenson, Pamela

  Perhaps the Great Whites were no longer hungry. They had been taunted with tuna bait on the surface to draw them closer to the non-divers on the boat, and many of them had managed to grab the chum. And that was on top of their 5am sea-lion hors d’oevres. But I was really surprised that it was so hard to lure them towards our cage. And frustrating – I was dying to get a stunning snap of a massive pair of open jaws.

  But the Great Whites would not co-operate. Were they camera shy? They swam gracefully around us at a respectful distance, behaving just like, well, ordinary fellow undersea creatures going about their business. My brain found this hard to comprehend; it was contrary to everything I had heard or believed about the greatest predators in the sea. All it would take, I thought, would be a few drops of blood and they’d swoop on you in an instant (as a teenager I had been careful to never swim in the sea if I had a cut or was menstruating – just in case). Yet here we were, carving up a giant tuna, with gallons of blood already swirling around us, and yet these top food-chain critters stayed far off. I began to take some photographs but, annoyed by the bars of the cage, I unlatched the door and swam outside. Now I’d got my buddy’s attention. He raised his tuna knife to shrug his shoulders and stared at me in alarm. ‘What the hell are you doing out there?’ His eyes were bulging behind his mask. ‘Take it easy,’ I casually returned his semaphore, then turned my back on him and inched closer to the nearest toothy beauty to get a better shot.

  Within seconds, a strong, insistent pair of hands was dragging me back inside the cage. ‘Are you crazy?’ He was glaring at me, with one finger circling his ear. Dive buddies rely on each other underwater, and it is certainly wise to caution another diver who might be taking unnecessary risks. But for me, being within feet of creatures that are considered to be the most dangerous in the world without a barrier was profoundly moving, illuminating and life-affirming. These gigantic killing machines were truly the stuff of nightmares – the terrifying nemeses in Spielberg’s Jaws – a movie that tragically led to a huge escalation in the slaughtering of sharks generally. And they weren’t even interested in me. Phooogh. A girl could feel quite rejected.

  Rejection, of course, is a common experience in the centre of the movie industry. In Los Angeles one risks rejection on so many counts; for being too plump, too old (guilty as charged), too light, too dark, too worldly, too naïve, too poor, too different, too bold, too timid, too bright, too dim, too honest, too sly. The only things you could never be criticized for were being too rich or too thin. Even my husband was at risk for being considered too rude, too volatile, too Glaswegian . . .

  What about you? You provided strong support for your husband, but what was it like for you to undergo such a massive relocation, such an enormous change?

  Well, it wasn’t easy, but I really didn’t mind. Los Angeles always tickled me. I loved the craziness of it, the laidbackness of it, and even its stupidity. I remember being struck by the amazing vehicles – bright pink stretch limos and even cars that were turned into works of art by a self-promoting actor called Dennis Woodruff. I was curious about the unusual people one would see on the streets: a man in a long, brown robe carrying a cross (people called him ‘Jesus on Sunset’) and, of course, the many movie stars who were just going about their business doing everyday things. Some of the more bizarre sightings I remember were Monica Lewinsky out shopping in Fred Segal, Cher in a diner, and the time when I accidentally got my heel trapped inside a man’s shoe as I took my seat beside him at a film premiere; then realized it was Jeff Bridges. Ouch – for both of us!

  But we already had some happily memorable moments from an earlier time when Billy and I had first visited the town together; when the first Star Wars movie came out and Roger Taylor from Queen took us to see it at what was then known as Mann’s Chinese Theatre. I had never been in such a loud cinema before – I guess it was early ‘surround sound’ – and I remember the place was knee-deep in popcorn. But it was enormously exciting. I could never have imagined that I would one day interview the girl with the weird plaits over her ears on a psychology TV programme called Shrink Rap. But, back then, who knew – outside the Hollywood Inner Circle – that Carrie Fisher was, well, Carrie Fisher; a brilliantly funny and bright writer struggling with bipolar disorder, hiding behind a cute smile and a button nose?

  Everything in Los Angeles at that time seemed extreme. There were a lot of very thin people, who lived on diet coke (and often recreational coke as well) and had all the money, and a lot of very fat people who lived on burgers and hot dogs and just waddled around the theme parks. No one seemed to be of medium weight. I used to joke that they don’t let you into Beverly Hills if your thighs wobble but it was sort of true; it took me precisely four months of living there to decide I needed a personal trainer.

  So . . . your weight issues really came to the fore in that environment?

  Yes. I remember becoming extremely body-conscious, comparing myself to other women to an extent to which I’d not done in the past. It was the first time I’d lived in a place where people really prioritized youth and beauty over intelligence. Wealth was important for a man, but a woman had to be gorgeous and appear young, or she was ignored. Almost all the women I knew were blonde; it seemed to me you had to emulate the California-girl style, even if you were, say, Jewish or African. And it was a complete no-no to look your age, which meant an enormous amount of cosmetic tweaking all round. See, the Californian climate dries out your skin and actually promotes wrinkles, so the beauticians, masseurs, personal trainers, hairdressers, personal shoppers and plastic surgeons all do big business in attempting to reverse the signs of ageing. I began to consider procedures and treatments I’d never heard of before – liposuction, laser skin resurfacing, human growth hormone injections. At one point I was pulled aside by one society woman and chastised for telling my true age. ‘Honey, if you’re gonna tell people you’re forty-two, no one’s gonna believe I’m thirty-five. Zip it!’

  In those days the unofficial social king and queen of Beverly Hills were Marvin and Barbara Davis. Marvin, who died a few years ago (leaving the kids to have monumental and public squabbles about the money), was a street-smart business man of Irish descent, while his wife was a glamorous blonde from a Jewish family from Dallas, Texas. Marvin had run 20th Century Fox studios and, among other properties, owned the exclusive Pebble Beach golf resort as well as Aspen ski resort. The Davises were the power couple above all other power couples; you had only to watch huge Hollywood stars kowtow to them to be certain of that. They held an annual charity event called the Carousel of Hope Ball that would be attended by princes, presidents and the biggest stars in sports and the performing arts; and every year they had a major Christmas party that provided the benchmark for a person’s success the previous year – an invitation to it was a decided thumbs up. One would arrive in evening dress and be greeted in the drive by carol singers dressed in Victorian costumes, while elves hurled fake snow from the mansion’s ramparts.

  Walking in you’d probably find every one of your silver screen and music heroes – and a few TV stars, writers and politicians thrown in. Sidney Poitier and his wife Joanna, Frank and Barbara Sinatra, Berry Gordy, Don Rickles, Bette Midler, Sean and Micheline Connery, Clint Eastwood, David Niven Junior, Yvette Mimieux and her husband Howard Ruby were just a few of the people who attended each year. Someone incredibly famous would get up and sing; one year it was Barbra Streisand, then Stevie Wonder sang ‘White Christmas’. David Foster usually played the piano. As we left we were always plied with large wooden nutcrackers, music boxes and hot chocolate. One evening I walked in ahead of Billy and Frank Sinatra stood eyeing me up from one side of the hallway. ‘You look so purty!’ he winked. I’ve kept the dress I was wearing that night – purple crushed velvet with gold trim made by Antony Price. I wish it still fitted me.

  It was Michael Caine who introduced Billy and me to the Davis family, and we were grateful because not only did we find them charming and highly amusing, but t
hey were kind enough to include us at all kinds of fantastic gatherings. The Davises hosted EVERYBODY. Sometimes we’d go to one of their weekly movie nights, held in their own cinema. They’d rent a first-run movie and we’d all sit munching popcorn in large, reclining armchairs. The Davises were incredibly generous to all their guests, but it was terribly discombobulating to look around the room and see people you’d idolized for years tucking into their thin-crust, smoked salmon and crème fraîche pizzas (a speciality of celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck who usually catered).

  Our kids were also subjected to fame-fest parties, although fortunately they were relatively unaware of it all. One day our middle daughter Amy – then around eight years old – was invited to attend a children’s birthday party in a Hollywood mansion. When she returned she was wide-eyed with excitement. ‘They had a petting zoo!’ she exclaimed. ‘And there were peacocks walking around. And a funny old man in a dressing gown.’ We finally worked out that the latter was Hugh Heffner (at the time when he was married with children), and that she’d actually been partying at the Playboy Mansion! OMG. Another time we were invited to Berry Gordy’s place for an Easter egg hunt. Now our kids may have complained that the boys from Michael Jackson’s extended family were super-fast and took all the eggs, but Billy and I just thought it was a hoot.

  There were many ‘OMG!’ moments during those early years in LA. After a while we became pathetically blasé about hanging out with our heroes but early on it was shocking. You’d be invited for dinner and discover that the house you were approaching up a stunningly impressive drive was the mansion from the TV show The Beverly Hillbillies. It was not unusual to be treated, after dinner, to a performance by someone amazing. Once it was an incredible Motown group, another time it was the fabulous Natalie Cole. Once at the Davises’ Christmas party, the New York Rockettes high-kicked up and down their grand spiral staircase, and when a large soul choir sang after dinner, Sean Connery got up and danced spiritedly in an impromptu attempt to recover his African roots. Or something like that; I believe alcohol was involved. But I adore Sean. He’s a really wonderful human being who doesn’t care a jot about Hollywood rules.

  The carpool lane at school was often a celebrity parade, although there was something quite stressful about feeling you had to be in full make-up just to pick up the kids. Careers, I was told, were made and lost in the supermarket aisles; you didn’t want to be caught under that harsh lighting by any prospective movie director. And the beach was even worse. An industry town takes no prisoners; no wonder I was already thinking about moving on from show business. But I came to understand how an Inner Circle works. No outsiders, no gossip to outsiders – although there was plenty of gossip within the group. Everyone seemed to know exactly how much people made. Billy was often called upon to be funny after dinner, and he was always brilliant, but it made him very nervous to be expected to entertain such illustrious people and eventually he began to dread it. Unlike Don Rickles, who simply stood up and roasted everyone mercilessly. ‘Bob Hope couldn’t be here tonight. He’s looking for a war.’ (To Sinatra): ‘Frank, I know you won’t like to hear this but your career’s over.’ Billy usually talked about something topical, which made me very nervous, because most people there were Republican, and an ex-President or two were usually present – perhaps Ronald Reagan. Looking very gaga, poor man.

  In the world of rock ’n’ roll, wives and girlfriends are a necessary evil. I probably should have realized long ago that an invitation to Billy from a pop star does not necessarily include me. Well, excuse my feminism. When David Bowie invited Billy to hang out with him at his hotel in LA, I should have taken the hint, but I didn’t. David, of course, is enormously bright and interesting. He loves contemporary dance, and introduced us to the brilliant dance group La La La Human Steps, which features strong women lifting men and even throwing them around the stage. I loved seeing that. I mean, I don’t know how they could have done that without juicing themselves up with testosterone to increase their upper body strength, but what’s a moustache or two between friends?

  Anyway, just an hour or so into our evening with David at his hotel – in keeping with my usual ability to make a terrible faux pas – I suddenly said, ‘Oh my God, David – you’ve got one brown eye and one blue one!’ David gave me a sideways look. Of course, almost everyone in the world knew that he has mismatched eyes. (What is WRONG with me?) David then embarked on a talkathon, that is, he and Billy ‘rapped’ for almost eight hours non-stop. I have no idea what they talked about – I was just desperate to leave and find my bed. I was so tired I could barely stay upright, but my brain kept going, ‘It’s DAVID BOWIE! I’ve GOT to stay awake.’

  Then there was that party at Gail Zappa’s house where porn mogul Larry Flint arrived in a wheelchair disguised as a gold throne pushed by burly Men in Black – it was for Moon Unit Zappa’s karaoke wedding at which even the priest did a number (well, one of the priests – I think it was the Christian one. The other person officiating at the wedding was a chubby woman who ‘worked with crystals’). But I think everyone’s energy was well-UNbalanced by the end of that evening. I’ll never forget Rose McGowan, a very pretty soap star who was going out with Ahmet Zappa at the time, doing an amazing rendition of a heavy metal number in a frothy summer frock – wonderfully bizarre. And, after the newly-weds retreated up the aisle, they returned in terrycloth dressing gowns with towels round their necks à la rock ’n’ roll and sang a number. Crazy, enormous fun. I love the Zappa family, especially Diva who likes to knit (a thoroughly rebellious act for one of Frank’s daughters) and Dweezil who’s just so goddamn cute. And Gail keeps dropping bombshells like: ‘We lived next door to Charlie Manson and his “family”. I used to see their comings and goings through my kitchen window . . . !’

  One of our favourite couples to hang out with in LA was Sidney and Joanna Poitier. Wonderful people, and I especially loved to see Sidney go from elder statesman to giggling Bahamian kid in a nanosecond – usually when Billy pushed his funny bone. The Poitiers kindly helped us place Scarlett and Amy in the same school their own children had attended. Later, I enrolled Amy at the same school the Zappa kids had attended, and Scarlett joined her a couple of years later. Once it was a kind of hippyish school, but now it’s also highly academic. ‘Yeah, I went to your school,’ Moon said to Amy. ‘We went barefooted if we wanted, and the vending machines only contained apples.’ Nowadays pupils still call the teachers by their first names, and there’s no uniform. I really like that style of education; lessons are conducted in seminar form with everyone arguing the point, and the kids are really taught to think for themselves and question everything. Yes, the cult of the individual is alive and well in such schools; although it did make ‘answering back’ to one’s parents a virtue. I just had to put up with that.

  But the heady LA scene has its limitations. I could see that, if left unchecked, I could end up scoring high on the ‘vacant’ scale. I could turn into one of those blonde women – too thin to be healthy (if only!) – focused on charity events, perfecting the art of understated dressing to impress, regular nip ’n’ tucking, and sleeping with one’s personal trainer. Not my idea of a fulfilled life. After I caught myself doing ridiculous things, such as purchasing two Labradors at a charity ball, I thought, ‘Pamela, you’re losing it!’ and promptly decided to go back to school.

  Of course, it wasn’t just finding myself seduced by LA’s charmed life that made me want to switch careers. I finally managed to own up to the fact that I was bored with comedy. And show business in general. If you count my childhood shows, I had been performing for thirty-five years. I still loved the actual work, but most of the periphery stuff – touring, always having to try to look good, dealing with various quirky (actually, that’s being very kind!) agents and managers, press intrusion – it was all getting very old. So, what could I do? Appear in movies again? I was bored and annoyed with that kind of work – especially the auditioning process.

  In 1984 I had a new a
gent at Creative Artists Agency (CAA). Rick Nicita had been recommended to me by Richard Lester and we got on pretty well, at least he seemed to understand my sensibility. But I wasn’t really like other women who would go to auditions and be very accommodating. I didn’t know how to behave. For example, I once went to see a casting agent about being in a movie with Molly Ringwald. They flew me to New York because they were serious about casting me but, halfway through my reading, I stopped and said, ‘Listen, why don’t you get Cher to do this? She’d be perfect.’ Agghh! You’re not supposed to do things like that . . . What is WRONG with me?!

  Anyway, in Los Angeles, I was sent me to meet the well-respected movie-making brothers David and Jerry Zucker, who had written and directed Airplane! and were now looking for a comic actress to appear in their new spoof comedy Top Secret. The movie was set during World War II and the character I read for was that of a French woman involved in the French Resistance. She would lead the central male character into a wacky espionage scheme. I read a scene in my best French accent, and got on well with the Zucker brothers, so I thought I had a chance. But the message went back to my agent: ‘We’re looking for a REAL French woman.’ Well, I was fuming. ‘That’s ridiculous,’ I said. ‘I’m an actress, I can be totally French . . . N’est pas?’