We went down Ngorongoro Crater, up into Aberdares, across Lake Manyara. We went up the White Nile past clumps of knobby crocs that slithered silently down muddy banks and disappeared into the milky river, past cataracts and waterfalls and herds of happy hippos. Just like the Jungle Boat ride at Disneyland, I thought excitedly; a perfect copy, croc for croc, even to the huge mechanical hippos with their tiny metallic ears.
When it came to the adventure scenes, I was eager and fairly fearless, plunging into the thick of things: hanging out of helicopters, roping rhinos from the back of fast-moving trucks. But the prospect of playing my first real love scene had me terrified, turned my nerves of steel to mush.
I had kissed Steve McQueen in The Sand Pebbles, but, given my role as a missionary, the love scene was chaste and Victorian, a tender but furtive peck. It was memorable only for Steve’s behavior; as the camera moved in on our two heads in profile, he looked at me levelly and announced gravely, “I’m going to give you this close-up,” as if it were the gift of life, then positioned me closest to the camera as we entered our embrace.
Now I was expected to thrash around on a cot in Kenya with Yves Montand while a cameraman hovered overhead. Yves Montand was an idol in France: charming, talented, debonair—and old enough to be my father. I didn’t know how other actresses felt about it, but to me it sounded not dissimilar to a visit to the gynecologist—an intimate act performed on a woman by a man in impersonal, well-lit, well-attended surroundings.
Had I been truly womanly, truly worldly, one of those French actresses who did nude scenes as adroitly and as easily as they seemed to bear love children, I would face Yves on that cot wearing nothing but Yves. As it was, I was swaddled in towels, khakis and socks, dressed like an alpinist from the shoulders down.
In the end, I faced the scene forthrightly, with characteristic candor and courage—drinking so much wine at dinner that, by the time I hit the cot, I passed out. They’d set up the shot; there wasn’t time, the next day, to retake it, and so, before I came to I was on. Or under. From time to time I regained consciousness to find an insulted Yves straddling me, breathing huskily, or heaving my dead weight from side to side as Lelouch circled in with his camera for close-ups. Coming around briefly as Yves kissed me under the heat of the sun gun used for nighttime illumination, I grinned sheepishly and slumped back into the safety of my stupor.
Live for Life may have been a sappy title, but for me it was not inappropriate. The more I saw and learned about other people, other places, the greater my appetite for them grew.
I was oddly euphoric on these open-ended journeys, traveling alone, at peace and at ease. I felt a total sense of freedom, which I cherished: the opportunity to pick up and run; the ability to live like a man, to do as I pleased. I held my breath for fear that I might lose it.
In strange places I felt at peace; at home I was often restless. I’d begun to adapt to new places effortlessly, to make friends or go without. But my sense of well-being evaporated as I approached home ground and my guard went up. Gone was my ease … my ease with people, with places, with myself; gone was the sense of what was real.
9
COMING back to America in 1967 after almost two years away, I found the country chaotic, often unrecognizable. Women loped boldly by like aggressive astronauts in space-age silver Mylar miniskirts, flat open-toed boots, and bulbous bright earrings that looked like sonic equipment. Men in page-boy haircuts preened, ruffled and jeweled, lurching in high-heeled buckled boots, fashionably foppish, while women’s heads were shorn: they wore more eyelashes than hair, peering out from under the spiky black thatch shading each eye and trying to look like Twiggy, their patron saint.
America, they said, was a country divided: the new counterculture suddenly and sharply in rebellion against the old order; anarchy versus the status quo. To choose the first, the rhetoric said, was a declaration of war on the second—who seemed not to know (or care) that there was a choice to be made at all.
At first, neither did I. That year Truman Capote gave a black-and-white masked ball for four hundred friends at the Plaza; it was the season’s hottest ticket. I had just arrived back in New York and though, like so many of those attending the ball, I was not a friend of Truman Capote’s, I accepted the honor of the invitation with humility and due respect.
Wandering into the ball—“blissed out,” as Timothy Leary would say, by the wonder of it all—I was dressed in a white mink bunny mask with huge pink-satin-lined mink ears; Hal-ston had loaned it to me when Amanda Burden decided not to buy it. I thought I looked sensational; it never occurred to me that I might look ridiculous.
People swayed, Peter Duchin played, and the ballroom glowed and glittered; I saw Mia and Frank Sinatra, Babe and Bill Paley, Christina and Henry Ford, and I was standing with a small group talking when a reporter approached, notebook in hand, and politely asked us if we didn’t think it was a little inappropriate, this ball for four hundred people, when there was a war raging in Vietnam and people were homeless, starving and dying?
An appalled pause while people never at a loss for words were momentarily struck speechless. Inappropriate? Of course, it was inappropriate—it was beyond inappropriate—it was insane. As a reporter for Women’s Wear Daily, she might have been a better judge of what was inappropriate than we. Yet, in the righteous wrath of people caught red-handed, we huffed and puffed her down, deflecting our guilt.
“Oh, honestly,” I huffed, my bunny ears bobbing, every inch the white mink rabbit on the run.
“The question’s inappropriate,” snorted a man in a black velvet executioner’s hood standing next to me.
“The war is inappropriate, if you’re playing that game,” drawled another through a black-whiskered mouse mask with a rhinestone nose and tiny stand-up ears.
“One has nothing to do with the other,” snapped a princess from Paris in a towering white plumed headdress who had come, I guess, as a peacock. She lurched off regally, feathers molting, the subject clearly closed. Inappropriate, indeed.
I returned to Los Angeles to spend my twenty-first birthday with my family and friends. As the day approached, I grew hourly more insufferable, sending out invitations bordered in black asking people to come and “mourn the passing of my youth. Shrouds not required.” And yet, while this was the official declaration of my adulthood, my twenty-first birthday was not dissimilar to my sixth.
There were the same family friends from my parents’ generation: the Justin Darts, the Freeman Gosdens, the Leonard Firestones, Rosalind Russell, the Jules Steins, the Mervyn LeRoys, Cary Grant, the Robert Stacks, Frank McCarthy, Rupert Allen; old school pals of mine: Connie Freiberg, Kacey Doheny, Vicki Milland; and new friends met in films: Mike Nichols, Julie Christie, Warren Beatty and Roman Po-lanski. It was quite a mix.
They were served a lavish smorgasbord organized by my mother, and then I subjected them all to a screening of Snow White. I remembered every frame.
The world of Disney seemed far more rational than the changed city I’d come back to. Here, balding lawyers proclaimed themselves local leaders in the “Youth Revolution” sweeping the country and realtors celebrated a Return to the Earth in their Bel Air backyards. Hard-eyed, tight-fisted executives talked Peace, Brotherhood, and Love the same way they spoke percentage points and distribution. Especially love. Lots of love.
At lunch at the Bistro in Beverly Hills, ladies who never knew the meaning of the word were wearing platinum and diamond LOVE pins; dentists began draping themselves with bells and beads. Producers flashed peace signs from Mercedes to Mercedes, and all the agents started to dress like Nehru.
LOVE, I soon learned, was the merchandising windfall of the sixties, the mother lode of marketing, the Midas of four-letter words. There were love-ins, love beads and lovebur-gers. All you need is love.
In Beverly Hills, I was taken to what was promised to be a hippie party, given by Joan Collins and Anthony Newley in their large and stately home. The guests were people like Raquel W
elch, Sammy Davis, Jr., Natalie Wood, Roddy McDowall, Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra. Wait a minute, here-—these people are not hippies. Even I knew that.
A maid in a black taffeta uniform with a stiff white organdy pinafore rustled up and hung a brass ankh on a leather thong around my neck. She was holding a basketful of party favors: ankhs, peace symbols, flowers, colored beads—like trinkets the white man traded to the Indians. Several people seemed to be in costume, wearing headbands and rawhide jackets.
Finally, I understood—they were having a “hippie party.” And a few of the guests seemed less than enthusiastic: standing at the bar, a traditionally dressed middle-aged producer snapped impatiently at another, “Take that goddamned flower off your ear.” Where were the real hippies?
There was another party the following night where I might find a few old friends, someone suggested. In fact, it was being given by one—not simply a friend, but my first school sweetheart, Terry Melcher. In the four years since we had last seen each other, he had become a successful record producer, moving in the music world, working with rock groups—the Byrds, among others, producing their hit single “Tambourine Man.”
He lived in a house hidden high in Benedict Canyon on a tiny winding road aptly called ’Cielo Drive.’ You could hear the music before you saw the gate to the driveway—“Strawberry Fields Forever.” I arrived, alone and nervous, tripping over a water pipe, adjusting my eyes to the darkness and the sting of smoking sandalwood; squinting through the incense at strange people wedged in dim corners: the real hippies, it seemed, were here.
The women wore no makeup and their hair hung long and straight, sometimes braided with flowers or tied with bands round their foreheads; they wore jeans and fringed jackets, Indian robes looped with bells and beads, sandals and Indian moccasins. The guys were gaunt and shaggy: their hair hung long and straight, sometimes pulled into ponytails or banded at the forehead. They wore jeans and fringed jackets or Indian robes looped with bells and beads, and they padded around noiselessly in sandals and Indian moccasins. Except for their thick, drooping moustaches and long bushy beards, they looked exactly like the girls.
There were nuts and raisins and “organic” juices, and these “joints”—hideous, wet, withered things—that they kept passing like hors d’oeuvres, all of them seeming to stop in front of me as I looked frantically—like figuring out which fork—for signs of protocol. And always there was music: Beatles, Byrds, Stones, Mamas and Papas, Beach Boys, Janis Joplin, Doors—many of whom were there that night.
There were also boys who, not four years before, I’d had egg fights with: they looked like their hair had exploded and they were wearing beads and flowers and they weren’t kidding. This was no dress-up—this was serious.
“Hi,” I said, edgily facing a friend from high school. “I haven’t seen you since you were normal, heh, heh.” He smiled serenely and said what a “groovy robe” I had on; others nodded and asked if it were Indian. No, not exactly, they were lounging pajamas from Dior.
Evidently the Sweet Bird of Youth had passed me by like a Boeing and I found myself, at twenty-one, peering at the generation gap like a tourist—from the far side.
Two girls were speaking softly, their hair spun with wild-flowers. “I know a man who’s very rich,” said one. “He had a party for three hundred people and set his house on fire so he could film the reactions of the people running out.”
A guy dressed like an Indian tracker entered; someone called out, “Hi, Don.”
“Hi,” Don answered. “My name’s Martin now, I changed it for Subid, my religion.”
“Oh. Hi, Martin. Hey, could I see you Thursday?”
“Sorry, but I’m going to Venus on Thursday.”
“How about Friday?”
Next to Martin, a man in an Indian chief’s headdress, a fur-trimmed brocaded Edwardian jacket, a tattooed face, waxed moustache, and beard was staring at a boy with short hair, V-neck sweater and slacks, shaking his head and muttering, “What a strange guy.”
And in the background, “Come and set the night on fiii-yerr!” Such were the love songs of the sixties; Johnny Mathis would have to sit this decade out. I felt like Alice down the Rabbit Hole—nothing was the way it was supposed to be. This was not a party. What was this? The rooms were dim, for one thing, lit only by candles; and there was a stillness about this house full of people sitting silently, speaking softly, moving slowly in long robes and rawhide.
I was used to parties flooded with light, people, place cards, fish forks—normal parties with the constant clatter of conversation, lacquered lips, Formica faces; parties where you put your mouth in gear and, from the moment you set foot inside the door until you climbed in your fur to go home, no matter what, you never stopped talking.
Here they seemed contemptuous of small talk; when you met people all they did was smile and nod. What do you say to that? Nobody knew I had gone to Truman Capote’s party or even seemed to care about it. Nobody noticed the Cartier watch that had given my life new meaning. Nobody seemed to notice anything, actually, and nobody seemed or looked the same. So I hated this party where they’d changed all the rules; I was scared and uncomfortable and didn’t understand. What was important here? What mattered now?
Suddenly, there was Terry—sort of. His hair lapped his shoulders and a moustache trailed down his chin; he wore an Indian shirt, beads and jeans. We stared at each other, at our opposite worlds—surprised and uncomfortable. “Hi, Tanker,” he said softly. “It’s really good to see you here.” I could not manage such a simple, gracious greeting and launched instead into my snappy New York repartee, sarcastic and wired, while he watched, waiting, not much liking my new suit of armor, silently kidding me about my carefully acquired affectations. Gradually I gave up, seeing the silliness of the social game at which I had become too adept, remembering that it wasn’t something to be played with Terry, who hated the hypocrisy and did not share my skills.
We went into the bedroom to talk quietly, wondering what had become of each other since Terry had been twenty and I sixteen. To look at both of us, it had been some five years; our respective transformations were striking and self-explanatory. My life was everything Terry now condemned and rejected.
“Are you happy, Tanker?” he asked rhetorically as I shifted positions, accompanied by the clatter of my pearls.
Of course I was happy, I insisted. How could anyone not be happy with such an exciting life?
“Don’t you ever get lonely, though? You seem so old; don’t you miss being a kid?”
Well, sometimes, sort of. Yes, I guess I do. And I looked at Terry, my first love but also my friend, who stared at me so honestly. And I realized that there hadn’t been much honesty in my life of late.
As we talked softly into the night, I began to feel the sense of safety I’d lost when life had gotten too fast. And I sighed with relief over giving it all up for even a few hours: the armor and the artifice, the constant posing to protect myself against phantoms and age-old fears. I put away the arch grownup that I had invented and defended to the death (against what, again?). When we returned to the living room, it was empty in the early morning light. I felt like a kid as I drove slowly home.
In the days before I was to return to New York, Terry and I hiked the hills where both of us had grown up, took motorcycle rides up mountain fire roads and into oak-covered canyons only California kids knew and dared to explore. We walked through fields speckled bright yellow by wild-mustard seed, went on picnics, rode horses on the beach. It was as if nothing could touch us; we were two children of Paradise who found with each other a reprieve from the adults we knew we had to be.
And so I stayed. It was an odd—and tentative—choice, unexpected and surprising even to me. Terry’s life, in its way, made as little sense as the one I had just left, and I stayed at first on a day-to-day basis, simply postponing life in New York.
Bel Air yawns in the blue-white diamond dawn, stretches and rolls over into satin slumber. One of th
e more restricted, most expensive suburbs of Beverly Hills, it lies north of that great dividing line, Sunset Boulevard. It is referred to by those living south of Sunset as “the palatial district.” It is referred to in a pamphlet issued by the Bel Air Association as “a community of splendid homes, exquisite gardens and a prestige address of premier status.”
Inside the graceful grille of Bel Air’s gates is a rose-covered cottage that houses the Bel Air Patrol, the community’s special forces, who serve to protect its celebrity residents, among whom have been Elvis Presley, Jerry Lewis, Johnny Carson, Greer Garson, the Beatles and General Curtis LeMay.
Once inside, you are in a little kingdom of affluent insulation. A land where grass is still a lawn. It is the Happy Valley of the American dream: people who in the space of a lifetime have come from early urban renewal to late Bel Air baroque now pass their days in frosted harmony according to God’s Law or Louis B. Mayer’s, pickled in brandy, preserving Protestant or Jewish mysteries as the spirit moves them.
In the sixties, however, that harmony was nowhere to be found; the spirit went up in smoke. Bel Air found itself recoiling from an invasion of Rock People whose new “prestige address of premier status” also doubled as a crash pad for their less fortunate friends. Since their arrival the Bel Air Patrol had reported unusually high nocturnal border activity: a steady trickle of long-haired, barefooted, Indian-robed pedestrians with backpacks had been observed entering the area at nightfall and mysteriously disappearing into the interior.
Bel Air was baffled by its new land barons. The Bel Air Association sent a letter to selected suspect residents reminding them that their “Bel Air dwelling” was intended for one family only and asking if they could please reduce their number of house guests.
Knock Wood Page 14