by Dave Navarro
She won’t get out of the car. Navarro has waited so long for this day, worked so hard for it, spent so much money (more than a thousand dollars, in fact), and she won’t get out of the goddamned car. She’s just sitting there outside, talking with her manager, who is standing next to her pink convertible pleading in a hushed whisper. Within an hour, she will feel like one of Navarro’s closest friends. But right now she doesn’t want to go anywhere near him.
Navarro’s obsession with this woman began when all he knew of Hollywood and the Sunset Strip was what he glimpsed from the backseat of his father’s car. When he saw billboards of Angelyne—larger, blonder, and bustier than life—the advertisement worked. She sold herself to him as not just a star, but the star, the ideal embodiment of the Hollywood holy trinity of glamour, success, and desire. But, like the advertisements for the circus unicorn he had seen as a child, reality did not conform to expectation.
As he grew older and saw her around town, he began to realize that she wasn’t a real star or a great beauty. She was a sideshow attraction. He finally met her when he was eighteen and new to the L.A. club world. He was sitting at the bar of the Pyramid Club improvising a sculpture out of glasses, ashtrays, and purses when Zatar, the manager, walked over dressed in his usual jumpsuit. Dave had been banned from the club for the past two weeks because his last sculpture had collapsed and set the bar on fire. Either in order to apologize to Navarro or to impress Angelyne, Zatar brought her over to meet Dave. Young, bashful, and excited, Dave meekly raised his hand to shake hers. She glanced at it, then turned her head in the other direction.
As the Siouxsie and the Banshees song “Spellbound” blasted out of the speakers, Zatar yelled into Angelyne’s ear that Dave was from Jane’s Addiction. Her attitude suddenly changed. She turned toward Dave, face lit up, and began talking a mile a minute like they were best friends.
Normally, that would have been the final stroke of disillusionment, the end of the fantasy. But, after some time, it became a moment of reillusionment. Because to Dave, with that sensibility, Angelyne became an even more accurate embodiment of Los Angeles.
“To me, she’s a human being Andy Warhol would have created,” Navarro says, “a pop culture icon out of the Factory. The other thing I find attractive about her is that she has become a mythical creature, like the Loch Ness monster. You have to go to a certain area to look for her, and even then you never know if you will see her or whether she’ll look anything like the photographs.”
Around 1993, after a tae kwon do class on Santa Monica Boulevard, he ran into Angelyne’s manager of ten years, Scott Hennig, whom he recognized from an Angelyne documentary. He begged Scott for a poster and hung it in his garage, where, like the picture of Dorian Gray, it yellowed and wrinkled as Angelyne stayed the same. Soon after the photo booth arrived, Dave took the poster down and taped it to the inside of the booth, and the image of Angelyne became an early photo strip. Now it was time to obtain the real thing.
There are few who truly know where Angelyne came from or what her real name is. There are just the rumors. According to what seems to be Angelyne’s most truthful version of her story, she was born in Idaho. Her parents died when she was young and she moved to Hollywood with hopes of becoming a star. She sang in a band—punk rock, she says—and it was while promoting her music that she began plastering her face around town. As the band dissipated, the posters and billboards continued, now promoting nothing more than the living product into which Angelyne was fast turning herself.
“Some people become famous for being in music, films, TV, sports, whatever,” she says on her website. “I became famous through billboards. No one had ever done that before or even thought it was possible.”
Why billboards? “Billboards are huge,” she continues. “I love huge. I am huge.”
And thus Navarro’s obsession with getting her in the booth. “If she’s about huge,” he said, “and I am taking the tiniest picture I can take of her, that’s amazing.”
So Navarro called Angelyne’s manager, Scott, and presented his proposal. She has turned down Playboy covers, major movie roles, modeling jobs, and countless interviews, but, surprisingly, she accepted Dave’s offer. First, however, Scott had to come over and inspect Dave’s place to make sure it was up to the standards of his client.
He stopped by on a Tuesday, two days before Angelyne’s appointment on Thursday. He was tall and skinny, with a deep voice, a slightly backdated midwestern twang (as if at any minute he was going to say “aw, shucks”), and the awkward self-confidence of a genius computer hacker. He was like a geek version of Jim Carroll, and, in his mind, Angelyne was the goddess that she portrays herself to be. He seemed to see himself as a chamberpot to the queen: he knew all her dirty secrets and wasn’t going to let them out, no matter how much Dave pried.
“How old is she?” Dave asked.
“Young enough to be doing it but old enough to be doing it right,” Scott replied.
“Is that the answer you give everybody?”
“I just made it up.”
Around one of Scott’s belt loops hung a plastic and metal gadget that looked like a cell phone, but clearly wasn’t. When he went into the photo booth for his picture, he took it off and very carefully laid it on the oak table nearby. He was afraid to leave it alone in the room while he had the curtain of the photo booth drawn, but at the same time he seemed nervous about bringing it into the photo booth.
“Why don’t you just take that in with you?” Dave asked.
“Believe me,” he replied, suddenly serious, “there are plenty of better ways to die.”
The gadget, he explained after taking his photo strip, was a communicator from the original Star Trek television show, used to transmit such lines as “Beam me up, Scotty.” It was the holy grail to any Star Trek fan, and had cost him three thousand dollars.
“I’ve got a lot of stuff like my communicator,” he explained, “a lot of strange metaphysical items. And Angelyne’s very much into that too. That type of magic and power works in Hollywood, because that’s what Hollywood’s all about.”
He piously picked up his communicator. “You can reach anywhere with this,” he continued. “I’ve made a hundred phone calls on it, and it works.”
“What do you mean by phone calls?” Dave asked.
“You can communicate with whomever you want, even if they’re dead. But you can’t say anything about Star Trek into it or you’ll die.”
He held it in his hands and offered it to Dave. “I thought that maybe you could use it to talk with your mother.”
“No, that’s all right,” Dave deferred. But Scott insisted and pleaded, so persistently that he began to seem more eccentric than Angelyne. Eventually Navarro took the prop, stuck it in the photo booth, and took a picture of it alone, which didn’t seem to bother Scott. Nobody died, although Navarro did break a fingernail later that day.
Despite not using the communicator to channel the dead, Navarro passed the test, or so it seemed until Angelyne pulled up outside and wouldn’t leave her pink Corvette—one in her fleet of four.
Scott stands next to her, lurching over the top, trying to convince her it is okay to come into the house. Inside, Navarro and his assistant, Jen, have been preparing all day—cleaning, hiding drug paraphernalia, and ordering the pizzas and Diet Pepsi Angelyne requested. Now they watch the black-and-white silhouette of Angelyne and her manager in heated discussion on Dave’s security camera monitor and try to figure out what they can do to make her feel comfortable.
Finally, Scott comes inside and tells Dave to go out and talk to her. Navarro, blessed with the power to seduce anybody through mere conversation, cautiously approaches the car and leans in. All he has to say is, “Hi, I’m Dave,” and within minutes she is posing for photographs in front of the Corvette.
“You can take a picture of my car,” she offers magnanimously.
“Get where it says ANGELYNE,” Scott suggests proudly, pointing to the
license plate. “She’s a pro at this.” He turns to Angelyne: “Do you want to leave your door open?”
“No, close it,” she says in her helium-fed Marilyn Monroe voice, facing the Corvette and arching her back. “Do you like my leg up or down?”
“Up is great,” Dave says gently, cautiously. “Now, let’s try down. Thank you so much. No one will believe this.”
She wears a very short leopard-print dress with three large pink vinyl hearts up the front, matching gloves, big white glasses, and gold high heels. Her hair billows blond, rolling over her shoulders and framing her impressive cleavage. She has always claimed to be in her early thirties with a completely natural figure, and Dave plays along.
Dave shows her around his house. Through it all, Angelyne coos and oohs and squeals and chirps, as if she is a forties starlet too famous to age. She loves his Basquiat drawing with the words “Tin Tar Lead” drawn in marker, early Warhol print of a shoe, and guitar that used to belong to Kurt Cobain.
“You know, I couldn’t get rid of his ghost for the longest time,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“His ghost would follow me everywhere.” She is talking about Kurt Cobain.
“Oh, honey, I remember that,” Scott agrees.
She turns the corner into the next room and bumps into the wall. “That must be his ghost again,” she says. No one knows whether they are supposed to laugh.
Jen, wearing a T-shirt with 22 emblazoned on the back, sits at the computer, which has Angelyne’s website on display.
“Twenty-two,” Angelyne squeaks. “That’s the best number in the zodiac! That’s my most benefic, magnificent number. If something happens to you on a twenty-two it stays with you forever. Twenty-two was the first day I put up my billboards—and it hasn’t stopped since.”
“That’s right, honey, it hasn’t.”
Angelyne fiddles with the straps on the back of her dress, where a pair of safety pins completes the illusion of voluptuousness, and looks at the picture that hangs over Dave’s computer. It is a painting of a mother unicorn cuddling her son underneath a rainbow on a riverbank. Dave found the painting on the. I Internet and obtained it from the artist, Tim Jacobus. He has been considering using it as the cover of his solo album because it represents everything he never had in his life.
“I’m into gods and fairies,” Angelyne says as she surveys the painting. It is clear that Dave isn’t giving her a tour of his house anymore; she is giving the tour to him.
“I was once where the rainbow hit,” she continues. “I was in the rainbow. I was in the orange. Each ring had a different color and you could move through each ring. It was amazing.”
“I’ve never seen that in my life,” Navarro says, with either genuine or theatrical admiration.
“No one ever has,” she responds matter-of-factly.
On Dave’s table—a coffin with the lid closed and crumbs from past drug use still in plain view—there are two copies of Final Exit.
“I read that,” Angelyne gasps, raising her voice with each word.
“I think of it as a how-to book,” Dave says. “I look to it for ideas, I guess.”
If Angelyne understands what he is saying, it doesn’t register. “Did you read a book called How We Die? It’s really fascinating.”
As she speaks, her manager wanders onto Navarro’s balcony, surveying the Sunset Strip below for a billboard site visible from the Hollywood Hills. “Between Crescent Heights going into the curve of Beverly Hills is the most expensive strip of billboard advertising in the United States,” he explains. “It can run you ten thousand dollars a month plus.”
He surveys the land like a developer, examining each sign along the Strip. “Sometimes we’ll go up to Griffith Park and use telescopes and things like that to see what area has the most visibility. You know, we turn down seventy percent of the offers we get because we’ve accomplished what we set out to do just with billboards. She doesn’t have to do anything else unless she wants to. Most people are so crazy for their next job, but she’s the exact opposite. She’s reached her goal. And plus there’s the factor that the minute you tell someone no, they want it three times as bad.”
Angelyne marches outside and interrupts him, sending him to the car to get her Polaroid camera. She walks to the photo booth with Dave, side-by-side, almost intimately. It is working; they seem comfortable together.
“What kind of name is that, Navarro?” she asks.
“It’s Spanish. It goes back to my grandfather, who’s from the Basque country. There’s a whole region called Navarre that serves as the buffer zone between Spain and France. In the old days, everyone there had a name that was a variation of Navarre. Do you know the actor Ramon Novarro? My grandfather’s the one who gave Ramon Novarro his name. His real last name was Samaniegos, and he and my grandfather Gabriel were friends. He didn’t like his last name so he borrowed my grandfather’s, but a secretary at the studio spelled it wrong.”
Angelyne steps into the booth and takes a series of pictures alone, signing the release form and sealing it with an immense pink kiss. Pink, she explains, became her favorite color after she received a vision involving the Great Pyramids of Egypt.
Meanwhile, at the computer table, the telephone has never left Jen’s ear. Bijou Phillips has called three times. The first was to say that her dog had barfed in the car and she had driven to Dave’s house to get paper towels. However, she saw Angelyne’s car, thought she might get in trouble, and turned around. The second time was to demand that she be introduced to Angelyne.
“Well, I’m really pissed,” she pouted to Jen. “Dave promised me.” Jen explained that Angelyne was nervous and too many people in the house might scare her. Bijou hung up on her midsentence.
Bijou’s third call comes moments later: “I don’t care if she’s uncomfortable or not! I don’t care if she fucking dies! You guys are treating her like she’s the President of the United States!” [Click.]
Angelyne, unaware of the commotion, takes a slice of pizza off the computer table and lifts it over her head, letting the bottom corner droop tantalizingly over her lip. She raises her right leg until her shoe is parallel to her rear end and, at the same time, tilts her head back and slowly lowers the pizza into her mouth. She snaps cutely at it, looking around to make sure we see her, then giggles.
“So why do you have this whole Final Exit book?” she asks Dave.
“I was in Japan traveling with my girlfriend, Evelyn, and I had nothing to read. It seemed like an interesting, fascinating read.”
“Have you ever had any out-of-body experiences?”
“Several times.”
“So have I. I came out of my body. Did you ever?”
“I’ve had overdose experiences, and they were really serious.”
Outside, a car horn blares, followed by her manager walking back into the house with photos and posters for Navarro. “That was the official horn sounding your arrival,” he says, apologizing for leaning against the steering wheel.
Angelyne ignores him. “Your experiences were scary? Mine were won-DER-ful.”
“It was scary because I wasn’t supposed to be where I was. And I had the feeling that my mom was angry at the fact that I was there. She was angry that I had put myself there so soon. It wasn’t time. So mine wasn’t a natural, wonderful thing. It was more like I did something bad to myself.”
“Ooooooooh, my GOD!”
Standing opposite each other—Angelyne in pink, Navarro in black; Angelyne in leopard-skin gloves, Navarro in leopard-skin hat—they look like a self-made angel and a self-made devil struggling to find the little common ground they share. Angelyne suggests Dave come to a burning with her. He agrees, more to make her feel at ease than out of genuine interest.
“In my experiences I’m in control,” she explains. “Once I went straight into the light and I became only light, spread out. It was warm and sensual and wonderful and just …”
“Did yo
u feel like you had the choice to stay or go?”
“No,” Angelyne says. “I wanted to stay, but I had to go. One time, I was doing a burning with a friend who was totally into gothic stuff. It was very windy, and the wind kept blowing one of the candles out. And whenever it went out I saw a pierced …” She pauses and deliberates on how to explain the complexity of her vision. “If you think of the universe as a bubble, like a salt shaker, you can come out of the tiny little holes at the top. You’re not in a flesh body anymore, you’re just free. And you can fly.”
“So what exactly is outside this salt shaker?”
“None of the laws that apply here,” she answers radiantly. “It is anything you want. Here everything is black and white. You’re limited. You have pain and pleasure. There’s none of that over there, it’s all gray. Here, the good is tainted with the bad. But out there, the extremes are all together. It’s all just e-NER-gy.”
“She does astral projection,” Scott elaborates. “I do that quite a bit myself. But it’s not anything I can control. I’ve gotten to the point where I can recognize when I’m doing it. If you’re astral projecting, it’s hard to move your physical body. You’ll be lying there and if you want to lift a finger, it’s like five hundred pounds. A lot of times you get out and you can put your hand through a car and go, ‘Wow!’ It’s like being stoned or something.
“I’m trying to do more with it than just floating around and enjoying the sensation. But I haven’t astral projected for about six months. Whenever it does happen, the wind is out, it’s really warm, and the leaves are blowing. That’s like a flash going in my mind, saying, ‘This is astral projection.’ But I also keep thinking, ‘I can’t be wasting this much time here. I need to get back to work.’ I’m thinking logically, you know?”
“Ooooh, these are splendid,” Angelyne suddenly coos. Her photos have dropped into the tray of the machine, and she is admiring them, picking out her favorites. Although she obsesses over the strips, examining every detail of her pose and image, she is not as vain as many of the models who have been in the booth and insisted on cutting what they thought were the bad pictures out of each strip. Angelyne lets Dave pick the photos he wants to use, discovering something different to love about herself in each one. That is, until Jen makes the mistake of saying, “It looks so old.”