In London, I interviewed most of the cast members of The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the “official poster magazine.” Woody had helped me get the assignment. It wasn’t what I’d gone to film school for, but as Woody reminded me, in his Humphrey Bogart accent, I needed “the dough.” Since I hadn’t seen the Rocky Horror play or the movie I was somewhat at a disadvantage, but after Woody pointed me to the right boxes, I could have performed a one-woman show of it.
With a brief stop in New York to pick up more boxes, Woody and I drove to Tucson, where he’d been assigned to write a story about The Villain. Directed by former stuntman Hal Needham, it starred Kirk Douglas, Ann-Margret, and, in his first romantic lead, the former bodybuilder and future governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The movie was a broad comedy caper based on the Road Runner cartoons, and they’d built an old Western town complete with saloon and “pleasure house” in nearby Rio Rico.
Feeling like a city slicker in my oxfords, I told Woody we needed Western boots.
“I’m Annie Hall when I should be Annie Oakley,” I explained. Woody was a huge fan of Westerns—he’d seen John Ford’s The Searchers at least thirty times—but there was no way he was going to wear cowboy boots. He favored L. L. Bean boat shoes, which he wore everywhere, except on boats. He agreed to drive me to Tucson, where I saw boots in every available color and skin, from ostrich to armadillo. The salesman, who was weighted down in turquoise and silver, asked what I wanted. “Something subtle,” I said. He looked crushed, so I added “but with texture.” He suggested Lucchese. The only Lucchese I knew had been head of a New York crime family and bore the nickname Three Finger, but apparently he was from a different branch. The Texas Luccheses had established the boot company in 1883, outfitting the U.S. Cavalry. The salesman explained that Lucchese had boots unique to every state, complete with depictions of the state flag, flower, and bird.
“What state are you from?” he asked.
“Massachusetts.”
“I’m not sure we have that boot. Where do you live now?”
“New York.”
“I don’t think we have that one either.”
He wondered if perhaps I might like the Montana boot, which was one of his favorites. I told him that if I were going to buy a “state boot,” I’d probably want to have visited the state at least once.
“If you really like them, we could go,” Woody said. His mix of sweetness and total impracticality was a source of constant amazement to me.
I settled on a stateless boot, in brown lizard skin, with hand-tooled curlicues running down the sides. I tried to scuff them up to make them look as if I’d had them for more than five minutes, but they still screamed city slicker.
Woody’s first interview was with Hal Needham, who was on a career high after directing Smokey and the Bandit, starring his best friend, Burt Reynolds. Prior to directing, Needham had enjoyed a stellar career as a stuntman, wrecking cars, leaping from horses, and breaking fifty-six bones and his back twice.
“I think we’re going to be pals,” Woody said.
Woody assumed that doing an interview was the start of a beautiful friendship, when it was usually only the start of a professional relationship that ended once the story hit the newsstand.
“I don’t think you’re going to become ‘pals’ with a daredevil stunt driver,” I said. “You have nothing in common.”
Woody put on his hurt face. “Yes, we do. We both love movies.”
Though The Villain was supposed to be a comedy, the only thing I found amusing was the sight of Schwarzenegger strolling around in a powder-blue cowboy suit that barely contained his bulging muscles. During a lunch break, I helped myself to some rice and beans from the craft service table, taking refuge in our rental car. Suddenly, the door opened and Schwarzenegger, minus the ten-gallon hat but still in the powder-blue cowboy ensemble, squeezed behind the steering wheel. The seat had been adjusted to Woody’s height and Schwarzenegger was practically curled into a ball. Dispensing with the niceties, he got straight to the point: “Doomp the leetle guy and be vid me.”
I was so startled, I dumped the beans and rice all over my lap. Schwarzenegger didn’t seem to notice. “Vat you doing vid him anyway?” he wanted to know.
Schwarzenegger was so huge it was like sitting in the front row at a drive-in movie. I’d never seen such a large head or hands. As he attempted to extricate himself from the car, he said, “We’ll cadge up layder.”
From then on, I couldn’t make a move without Schwarzenegger following me. Realizing the he-man approach hadn’t worked, he tried the courtly method.
“I can tell you ah a woman who likes ahht.”
“I’m sorry, I like what?”
“Ahhhht! Ahhht!”
“Oh, art. Yes, I like it.”
“Then we chute go to a museum together. There ah many intresting ones around.”
“We’re in the middle of the desert. Where are the museums?”
He didn’t know exactly but said we could go to any number of them and then have dinner.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“You don’t?” He looked crestfallen, as if he couldn’t believe somebody wouldn’t want to go to a nonexistent museum in a partially fake desert with a muscleman in a powder-blue lace-up shirt.
“I like your boots,” he persisted. “Where did you get them?”
I couldn’t remember the name of the shop, and anyway I didn’t want to go boot shopping with him. Next he offered to buy me a pair.
“No, thanks. I already have these.”
He shook his head, and then, putting on his ten-gallon hat, he lumbered toward the Pleasure House.
After Tucson, we drove to L.A., where Woody interviewed George Cukor about Rich and Famous, which starred Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen. Cukor, who was then eighty, had worked in Hollywood for sixty years, with such major stars as Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn, and Marilyn Monroe. Cukor’s greatest collaboration, however, was with Katharine Hepburn, whom he directed in eight films, including Holiday and The Philadelphia Story. I’d always loved Hepburn, whose mannish style was a forerunner to Diane Keaton’s, and whose affection for oxfords placed her in the company of such sexually ambiguous stars as Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. All three adopted the shoe for its comfort and subversive chic. Hepburn often paired them with loose-fitting trousers known as Oxford Bags, named after a popular style of slouchy pants that Oxford students favored.
In homage to Hepburn, I wore my version of Oxford Bags, along with my oxford shoes. Greeting us at the door of his home in the Hollywood Hills, Cukor, looking at Woody and then at me, said, “Well, she’s much prettier than you are.”
I was floating on air. The man who’d directed Garbo and Hepburn had called me pretty. Maybe he’d cast me in his next movie; though, given his advanced age, he’d have to work pretty fast.
Cukor took us on a tour of his house, a Mediterranean-style villa that Billy Haines, the actor-turned-designer, had decorated in the mid-1930s. We walked down a hallway filled with autographed photos of his movie star friends, into a library lined with autographed books by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Somerset Maugham, and Thomas Mann. “I think we’re going to be pals,” Woody whispered. Settling into the living room, he pulled out his tape recorder and began the interview. I knew from all the boxes marked Cukor that Woody had spent a lot of time on research. He started as he always did, at the beginning, which in this case was 1930. Cukor was initially flattered with Woody’s encyclopedic knowledge of his career, but after two hours, Cukor stood up and said, “I’ve had enough.” Woody couldn’t believe it. “But we haven’t even gotten to Rich and Famous,” he said. Cukor didn’t care. “You’re a very selfish young man taking up so much of my time. Now get out.”
I ran out of the house while Woody collected his things. A few minutes later, we were standing on
the lawn when Cukor opened the door. “Feel free to take a swim,” he said breezily. The pool looked exactly like the one in The Philadelphia Story. Hepburn and Tracy had lived in two cottages on the property.
“We don’t have bathing suits,” Woody said.
“You can go skinny dipping,” Cukor replied.
“Should we?” Woody asked.
All I could picture was the opening scene in Sunset Boulevard with the corpse of the screenwriter Joe Gillis floating in Norma Desmond’s pool. “You’re crazy,” I told him. “Cukor might kill you.” We started to laugh and couldn’t stop. We were still laughing as we climbed into our rental car and drove back to our Sherman Oaks rental apartment.
Several days later, Woody introduced me to his best friend, Warren, who lived in a magical 1930s Hollywood bungalow partially hidden in a maze of bougainvillea. Warren could have easily stepped out of an old movie; he was tall and handsome, with enough family money to allow him to indulge his various hobbies, which included collecting vintage movie posters. When I noticed Holiday and The Philadelphia Story mounted prominently on the wall, I told him my Cukor story, which by then had taken on a life of its own.
“Yes, I can see why he thought you looked like Katharine Hepburn,” he said.
“Oh, it was probably just the oxfords,” I replied modestly.
Warren had a separate photography studio on his property, where he took pictures of rock singers and aspiring actresses. He asked if he could do a shoot with me, and I agreed, although my previous experience with photographers had not been overly positive. My father’s picture-taking efforts frequently ended in tears because my mother usually had something critical to say. Scott conveniently lost all our photographs after we split up. Warren’s pictures of me exuded a 1930s glamour that was all the more remarkable because I hated being in front of a camera. Warren had a great eye. He also had a motivation problem, which didn’t bode well for a sustained photography career, but at heart, he was a true collector, not only of movie posters but vintage photographs and postcards and anything that evoked the romantic past.
Woody and Warren had known each other in high school, cementing their friendship as film students at NYU. The two had a “bromance” long before the term existed. Not only did they share a love of movies and collecting, but they were also hysterically funny, each trying to outdo the other. Often they’d laugh so hard that tears would run down Woody’s cheeks. It was hard not to feel like a third wheel. Woody got along better with Warren than he did with me. They were “pals” in the truest sense.
After nine months of being on the road, Woody and I finally settled back in New York, where we cemented our relationship with a wire fox terrier named Katie. Eager to avoid any behavior issues, Woody immediately hired the “Dog Commander.” With her porcelain skin and cascading curls, the Commander looked as if she’d come straight from a Renaissance fair, but behind the Pre-Raphaelite exterior lurked a canine dominatrix. Snapping Katie’s leash like a whip, she barked orders in a cool, firm voice. Terriers, she cautioned, have a stubborn streak, and it was important to establish who was boss. To help regulate the dog’s schedule, we had to make sure she ate her meals at a set time every day. The minute she finished, one of us had to take her outside. Beginning at seven P.M., we had to withhold water so she wouldn’t need to urinate in the middle of the night. During the day, the Commander ordered us to keep a sharp eye on her to avoid any accidents. The best way to do that, she explained, was to attach a long lead to her collar and then place it around one of our ankles.
Woody posted a weekly “Dog Schedule” in the kitchen, specifying who would walk the dog and when; who would keep the dog fastened to his or her leg; and who would practice the Dog Commander’s lessons. Woody believed in an equal division of labor, which was perfectly fair, but I began to view him as the Human Commander.
Meanwhile, Warren sublet an apartment for six months in Woody’s building. While Woody cooked his signature dish—Spaghetti Woody—Warren would discuss his love life with me. He had been in therapy for years and was the epitome of the new cultural icon: the “sensitive man.” Yet he was totally unrealistic when it came to women, expecting them to live up to a movie star ideal, but since no woman could compare to the celluloid Katharine Hepburn or his other favorite star, the helmet-haired Louise Brooks, he was always disappointed. It kept him safe from having to commit to a relationship, as did his unfortunate habit of becoming infatuated with his friends’ girlfriends. After I once told him that he looked better without his glasses, he’d whip them off whenever we got together, and then bat his blue eyes.
One night, as we were all sitting on Woody’s bed eating Spaghetti Woody and watching Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story for the umpteenth time, I began to weigh the pros and cons of both men. Woody was a hard worker. Warren didn’t like to work. Woody had to watch his money. Warren watched it fly out the window. Woody was short. Warren was tall. Woody lived in the real world. Warren lived in a fantasy. My polygamous fantasy ended, however, when Warren returned to L.A. and fell in love with a singer/songwriter who fulfilled his twin fantasies: She looked like Louise Brooks and she’d been involved with one of his friends.
After a lavish wedding at Tavern on the Green, the newly married couple moved from L.A. to New York, where Warren opened a movie poster gallery. The gallery’s logo was based on his favorite poster: a spectacular life-size one-sheet of a sultry Louise Brooks in G. W. Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl. As for the real Louise, she was a total free spirit who found herself caught up in a whirl of mandatory parties. Warren’s extended family was a large one, and now that the “prodigal son” had returned, he was expected to attend all the black-tie bar mitzvahs and other events he’d moved to L.A. to avoid. With her aspiring singing career in limbo, Louise was truly a lost girl; she spent her days getting facials and buying shoes. I wasn’t envious of the family parties, but as a struggling writer, I was definitely envious of the shoes.
By the early 1980s, oxfords had fallen out of fashion in favor of “look-at-me” footwear. The Reagan presidency, with tax policies that favored the upper class, resulted in a period of conspicuous consumption not seen since the Gilded Age. Nothing was considered too over-the-top, from Lacroix $15,000 “pouf” dresses, to financier Saul Steinberg’s fiftieth birthday party, featuring actors posing as re-creations of famous Old Masters paintings. Money was increasingly fracturing Manhattan, with artists being driven from SoHo lofts to make room for investment bankers who wanted to live like artists.
Women’s shoes exemplified the growing class divide. The 1980 New York City transit strike prompted thousands of female employees to don sneakers. For a “working girl,” like Melanie Griffith in the Mike Nichols movie of the same name, the trend continued after the strike because they couldn’t afford to take taxis, and sneakers were more comfortable when dealing with subways, buses, and ferries. Women who didn’t need or want to work could indulge in fantasy shoes that mirrored their rarefied lifestyles.
The designer Maud Frizon best captured the era’s over-the-top frivolity. With their eye-popping metallic colors, scalloped edges, and butterfly appliqués, Frizon’s shoes had a rock star/fairy princess quality that appealed to the imagination. Her personal story was equally seductive. A former Parisian model, she’d married an Italian shoe salesman who’d fallen in love with her “perfect” size 6 feet. With their two children, they lived in a chateau in the Loire Valley, where she dreamed up fanciful shoe designs while he handled the business. When I later described Frizon’s enviable life to my therapist, she said, “Ah! The ‘unseen hands’!” She was referring to Jean Cocteau’s film Beauty and the Beast, in which invisible hands catered to Beauty’s every need. Frizon’s whimsical creations, with their astronomical price tags, symbolized a life where I could write without intrusions—a room of one’s own, with invisible servants, and a massive shoe closet.
I was then working in a small back room in Woody
’s apartment, where I had to climb a Matterhorn of periodicals to reach my desk. Living in a pseudo library should have been conducive to writing, but it wasn’t. Woody could toss off a story in a matter of hours, while I’d labor over each sentence. Though I wanted to be equally productive, I constantly fell short, and Woody would then lecture me on developing better organizational skills. I realized I needed a place of my own. I’d loved his back room for the comfort it gave me, just as I loved Spaghetti Woody and regular Woody. I adored his brilliant mind, vast knowledge of history, wonderful sense of humor, and huge heart. He was totally unique, and I knew I’d never find anyone quite like him. And then there was Warren, who had recently purchased the actor William Powell’s 1930s velvet smoking jacket; he was trying to remake himself and Louise into the urbane husband-and-wife team, played by Powell and Myrna Loy, in the Thin Man movies. If Woody and I split up, who’d gain custody of Warren?
Woody and I had always had a fairly combustible relationship, but as I’d outgrown my protégé role and he’d grown tired of mentoring me, we began to bicker over stupid things—who’d walk the dog, do the dishes, buy the spaghetti. I wanted to move back into my old apartment, but Emily, who’d followed me to New York, was living in it. She’d become a talented jewelry designer but wasn’t making a lot of money and I felt responsible for her. As a result, I didn’t want to evict her from my Upper West Side apartment and she didn’t want to leave. This caused a lot of tension between us and prolonged my deteriorating relationship with Woody.
9 1/2 Narrow Page 13