Big Dreams

by Bill Barich

  Beneath her contrived innocence, though, she was a demon negotiator. Along with Chaplin, Griffith, and her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, she began a new company, United Artists, in order to grant them all more creative control over their movies, as well as to earn a larger share of the box-office gross.

  The creation of Hollywood stars demanded an accelerated effort from the publicity departments at studios. They had to crank out reams of factual, quasi-factual, primarily fabricated, and grossly false releases to exalt the actors in their stables. It became expedient for a star to live on a scale befitting his or her astral stature, above all other mortals, whether or not he or she could afford it—in a Pickfair, say, the faux Tudor hunting lodge that Fairbanks and Pickford built in the Hollywood hills.

  The first map to the homes of the stars hit the newsstands in 1924. Fans could now conduct their own tour of the kingdom and judge for themselves how wretched they were by their distance from the fabled aura. Some people were amused by the tour, but others returned to their own homes feeling diminished, or fueled by crazy ambition.

  No life could be as fulfilling as a star’s life. That was Hollywood’s message, so it made sense that the public applauded whenever a famous actor took a fall from grace via drink, drugs, or a sexual tangle. The mores of most Angelenos—and most Americans—were still those of the middle-western Bible Belt, and a fall confirmed that there was indeed something sinful afoot in the movies. Even the beloved Mary Pickford dropped out of the firmament when she dared to divorce her husband.

  The attitude of most people toward Hollywood was firmly set by then. It amounted to push-pull, or attraction-repulsion, and the movie industry was quick to recognize this and would milk the antipodes forever after.

  Hollywood had turned into something very different from the temperance community that Horace Henderson Wilcox had visualized. It had turned into Oz, and it only remained for a pig-tailed child star, Judy Garland, to consecrate the transformation by uttering what amounted to both an in-joke and an undeniable truth after she and her little dog went flying through the sky.

  “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto,” Judy said.

  AWAY FROM SANTA MONICA and the ocean, the skies were once again rinsed in iodine. Where Sunset Boulevard began its descent into Hollywood, I stopped to buy a map of the stars’ homes from a twelve-year-old Mexican boy from the barrio. Somebody had picked him up in the morning and stationed him under a palm tree, and somebody would retrieve him again at night and shell out a miserly commission.

  The map cost five dollars, and I could see immediately that I’d been had. It listed the present or former homes of a couple hundred movie stars, many of them in the graveyard with poor Wilcox. It even cannibalized the Ur-map of ’24 and provided addresses for Chill Wills (17984 Boris Drive, Encino) and John Barry more (6 Beverly Grove, Beverly Hills). There was an advisory note that stated, “Many Movie Stars prefer to live a secluded (secret) life.” You can’t be more secluded or secret, I thought, than in your burial plot at Forest Lawn.

  I studied the map over a gin and tonic at Musso & Frank’s on Hollywood Boulevard. The restaurant was so ancient that the menu, still typeset daily, went in for dishes like corned-beef hash and liver and onions—dishes from the Eocene of cookery, meals that could kill you on the spot. Musso & Frank’s had never been a Chasen’s or a Brown Derby, but you could ordinarily spot one or two almost recognizable actors in the house. The waiters were old and crusty and had probably served a few crab-stuffed tomatoes to Chill Wills.

  On Hollywood Boulevard, tourists were gawking at the sidewalk stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. At that moment, they understood themselves to be absolutely in California and nowhere else. They jumped from star to star as though they were on a treasure hunt, ignoring the evangelist who was standing on Nina Foch and handing out salvation tracts.

  “Clark Gable!” they cried, just as I had done ages ago. “Marilyn Monroe!”

  There were no soda fountains at Hollywood and Vine anymore. I didn’t find any agents lurking about or anybody being discovered, not even beauty queens from Tehachapi. As smog was to L.A., so, too, was beauty, omnipresent and virtually inescapable. You needed more than a pretty face to make it in the movies.

  It could be hard on the beautiful when their luck or their savings ran out. Sometimes they took to strolling the boulevards and turning tricks, or worked as strippers or in peep shows, or commuted to San Fernando Valley to perform in the porn videos that were fast becoming another thread in the brocade that defined California for outsiders, elevating mega-boobs and monumental penises into the hallowed ranks of beaches, surfers, and palm trees.

  Beauty in Hollywood was just another commodity, really. Anyone could buy it. If the gene pool had cheated you, you could amend things by submitting to the scalpel and the sutures. The cosmetic surgeons around Los Angeles offered a dim sum of alterations big and small.

  At a newsstand, I browsed through the ads in a local magazine and saw that hair replacers were as easy to find as auto mechanics. Radial keratotomists were set to adjust your eyesight and rid you of your hideously disfiguring glasses. Dentists of an aesthetic bent had the formula for bonding and whitening your teeth. The Leg Center could heal your varicose veins with sclerotherapy. Did your calves need enlarging or reshaping? Mel Bircoli in Beverly Hills was just a phone call away.

  Cellulite removal, breast augmentation or reduction, scar revisions, penile implants, corrective tucks for protruding ears, forehead lifts, skin peels, and collagen injections for suckier lips—the phantasmagoria of options was rich enough to keep the nation’s stand-up comics in business for years, and yet there was something touching about the frailty on display. Again, it amounted to a longing for physical perfection that might well be a modern California corollary to the ancient spiritual desire to be cleansed of sins.

  Around Los Angeles, a city singularly uncommitted to the hereafter, the body truly was the temple. Corporeal demands had won out over any demands of the spirit, it seemed. Among the believers, a bald pate or a flat chest or chipped teeth or misshapen calves could be an awful stigma. Such flaws paraded in public announced that the maimed person was too poor to get fixed. And if you were poor, you had to be stupid, too, because money was everywhere, miles of money, money dropping from the clouds.

  This narcissistic California, this California of tiny salads and bottled waters, a fartless, belchless, striving-to-be-pure California of monied Los Angeles, remained a riddle to me. The excesses were seriously embarrassing, but then I’d hear the voice of a believer in my surgically unenhanced ears.

  “What’s the harm?” the voice asked. “Why shouldn’t people feel a little better about themselves if they can afford to?”

  It made me wonder about my hoary, preapocalyptic attitude, some warmed-over moralizing imported on the Mayflower. There was nothing for it. I went back to Musso & Frank’s for another drink and wrestled with the deeper philosophical issues, the barely graspables.

  What if the scalpel- and hormone-enhanced perfection of the wealthy had the side effect of making less-fortunate souls feel even worse about themselves? Would a battle cry of “Nose jobs for everybody!” someday spearhead a revolution? Or were the poor and the stupid merely waiting in the wings for their own shot at affordable surgery, a California program on the order of Head Start to bring more and better beauty to the masses?

  O, the confusions of L.A.! It seemed only right that I should be pondering the imponderables in the vicinity of Frederick’s of Hollywood, where the windows were filled with crotchless panties and push-’em-up bras, and just a stone’s throw away from the Church of Scientology, dispenser of self-involved religion in the country of the self-obsessed.

  THE AGENT DROVE A LEXUS. She had a cellular phone and personalized license plates. She did not work for either Creative Artists or International Creative Management, the two big talent agencies in town, but for a boutique agency that did extremely well for a select roster of clients. She was petite, fit, sma
rt, pretty, and rich.

  It was a measure of her power that she felt secure enough to wear the oversized black eyeglasses favored by titans like Lew Wasserman and Irving “Swifty” Lazar—eyeglasses that looked at hideous disfigurement without blinking and stared it down.

  The Agent had agreed to dish me the dirt on Hollywood over lunch at Langan’s Brasserie in Century City. Our order was the standard one, two salads with the dressing on the side and a bottle of mineral water from some springs high in the Caucasus Mountains, near a grotto blessed by the Holy Virgin.

  We started with some gossip. The Agent’s was fresher than mine. I tried the story about Aaron Spelling and the seashells, but she topped me. She told about a birthday party that the Spellings had given for their daughter, and how the curtains on a home-entertainment stage had parted to reveal the party’s special guest, Michael Jackson.

  Next, she told about a director known for his low-budget features, who was so stingy that his son was suing him and his gardener had chopped down his hedges in a dispute over wages. Then there were the usual sexual rumors and innuendos to be explored, the ordinary speculation about who might be homosexual or bisexual or into S & M or fooling around with gerbils.

  This insider gossip had a purpose, I saw. It was Hollywood’s backhanded way of laying claim to some real life, canceling out all the sanitized pseudo-gossip that was retailed in the media. You had only to glance at The Hollywood Reporter to witness the vapidity with which the movie colony fostered an image of the industry as wholesomely American and beyond reproach. They wanted us to believe that they were still in Kansas.

  In his influential column, “The Great Life,” George Christy had recently covered a benefit premiere and had offered an account of it that was astonishing for its marshalry of petty details and its rigorous observance of status:

  … among the 1,400 guests dining on Along Came Mary’s grilled shrimp and stuffed chicken were Columbia’s CEO Victor Kaufman and his wife Lorraine, St. John’s Hospital’s Virginia Zamboni, CAA’s Mike Ovitz, Carol and Bill Haber, Ron Meyer, Barbara and Martin Davis, Julie and John Forsythe, Candy and Aaron Spelling, John Davis, David Geffen, Donna Dixon, Lilly and Brandon Tartikoff, Joel Silver, ICM’s Jeff Berg with Denny.…

  Christy had wheezed on through sixty-three more names, spicing the pot with two plugs for restaurants, before concluding the paragraph.

  The column would not have been out of place in a country-club newsletter in Emporia. It pointed up Hollywood’s middle-western roots and its earnest desire to paint a bright face in public. Most insiders recognized the absurdity, but they had to go along with it, because in the film industry the Cartesian chestnut about existence had been reformulated—I was mentioned, therefore I am.

  About the movie business, the Agent said: “The first thing you have to understand is that Hollywood, for all its influence, really is a small town. Everybody knows everybody else, what they’re worth and where they stand. Everybody knows what everybody else is working on. They know who isn’t working, and they know why. There are no secrets. Deals get made in living rooms. They get made on golf courses and on tennis courts. They get made in bed.

  “The second thing is that Hollywood is deathly conservative, like most small towns. It is sexist and it is racist. It is conformist. It can be incredibly unkind to anyone who isn’t young or hot anymore. There are no roles for older actresses, even somebody as good as Meryl Streep. An older actress has to build a production company, acquire properties, hire writers to tailor a script for her, and then cross her fingers and hope.

  “Third, the primary motivating factor in Hollywood is fear. Fear of losing your job, fear of displeasing your boss, fear that the boss you please is on the way out. Fear of not getting a good table at Spago or at Morton’s, fear of not being invited to Swifty Lazar’s Oscar party. There is an unconscionable fear of trying anything new or different.

  “You learn fast that it doesn’t pay to be brave. You learn never to try anything that hasn’t been tried before. The unwritten rule is, ‘When in doubt, imitate a success.’ If it fails, you have a built-in excuse. Say you do a Terminator knock-off and it doesn’t open. Say it dies in three weeks. The boss calls you in on the carpet, and all you have to do is wail, ‘But Terminator did so well!’

  “Fear breeds cowards. Let’s suppose you have a really first-rate script—a detective story, say—but another detective movie—Dick Tracy, say—has just flopped. Nobody will touch the property, regardless of how good it is. For two years, you’ll hear the same thing over and over again. ‘I love the script, but Dick Tracy was a flop.’ Then people start to forget Dick Tracy, and maybe, if you’re lucky, the picture might get made.

  “Fourth, this thing you have about movie stars? Forget it. There are only a few real stars in town. Bobby de Niro’s a wonderful actor, but he can’t open a picture. Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, those guys and a couple more. That’s about it. That’s the short list.

  “Stallone, you ask? Only if he stays in character and doesn’t pretend to be smart. Women? Maybe Barbra Streisand, because she can’t be stopped. And there’s always somebody like Julia Roberts who’s hot for a while and then disappears. Hollywood is a threshing machine for women. You can find people who’ll tell you that it’s deliberate.

  “Being a star has nothing to do with acting. A star has to be able to open a picture on the basis of his or her name, no matter how crummy the movie is. The window of opportunity is small. That first week can mean everything. Staying on top is extraordinarily tricky. The public is fickle. They want to see you do the same thing and then they want to see you do it again. They don’t like surprises. They know what they like, and it’s the same thing that they liked last time.”

  I interrupted her. “So the movies are like McDonald’s, right?”

  “Sure, they’re like McDonald’s. What isn’t like McDonald’s nowadays?

  “Anyway, being a star takes perseverance. It takes devotion, ego, intelligence, guidance, good fortune, and hard, hard work. You can never let up for a second. It’s certainly true that you’re only as good as your last picture. Katzenberg at Disney has made a mint hiring respected flops at rock-bottom prices—Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn, more directors than you can count on your fingers.

  “The business has changed in the past few years. It used to be hard to find studio heads who read books, but now it’s impossible. Everybody is twenty-seven years old, and they do not know about anything except the box-office grosses. They don’t want to offend anybody. They want movies that are ordinary and familiar.

  “There’s more money around than ever before, but it seems to go to fewer people. Cruise could probably get fifteen million for a picture right now—accent on the ‘right now.’ Another rule—money breeds caution and inversely affects the element of risk. Fewer movies are being shot in Los Angeles. It’s gotten too expensive. Producers search for cheaper locations and less red tape.

  “It used to be that if a picture flopped in the States, you’d pray to get some money back through a sale to TV. Now you look to the foreign market, which has really grown. You look to the videocassette market, which has saved many asses in this town. Take Batman, a lousy picture. It grossed maybe two hundred fifty million in theatrical release, but it did about four hundred million on cassette. An average film now does about a third of its gross in theaters and the rest in other markets. Movies have gone global.

  “You know what Hollywood stands for right now? Hollywood stands for TV. Almost all the network shows are done in L.A. Television is our bread-and-butter. You should know that. TV is what sells California to Americans.

  “The final word on movies is this—we’re dealing with a mainstream art that tries to pick the pockets of as large an audience as possible without totally discrediting itself. That’s why movies are so bland.”

  I had a couple of questions. “What about the Japanese? How are they regarded?”

  “When Sony bought Columbia, you got the predict
able paranoia. But the studios have been quietly chasing Japanese money for ages. You want to know what has the boys worried? The Japanese are taking over the private golf courses around L.A. An American guy quits or dies, and they jack up the cost of membership infinitely and sell it to a Japanese.”

  “How is it that somebody like Mickey Rourke still gets a million a picture when he’s never had a hit?” I asked.

  “That’s about the going price for a B-grade leading man. His movies do well overseas. And besides, a million dollars is not a lot of money anymore.”

  Miles of money, money dropping from the clouds. The millionaire, an inspirational figure from my youth, was dead in California.

  The Agent closed by saying, “I don’t want you to go away with the impression that Hollywood’s a bad town, because it isn’t. But it’s very real, and the old cliché is true—nothing matters but the bottom line. With all the money that’s at stake, the competition is fast, tough, and fierce.

  “How do you think it was in the gold mines, kiddo? You think those miners were sweethearts who looked out for one another? You think they were into sharing and caring? You’ve got another think coming. I’ll give you another cliché that also happens to be true.”

  “Shoot.”

  “In Hollywood, it isn’t enough to succeed. Your best friend must also fail.”

  IMMENSELY FAR from the aura cast by Hollywood, there was a penumbral Los Angeles that was crooked and raw. Nobody who lived there cared about the guest list for a benefit premiere or would ever taste the catered food of Along Came Mary. The penumbra was segregated and nonwhite, and the only movies that had legs among its citizens were blockbuster action films infused with lots of violence.

  Teenagers in the penumbra were staunch fans of Bruce Willis and Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone when he wasn’t trying to be smart. They saw Die Hard and Terminator 2 as many times as they could afford, because the movies were loud and bloody and reflected the destructive force of life in California as they knew it.