by Eve Babitz
Francis perseveres. He remembers what we like.
And we like movies. We like movies with plots, with people we care about, with scary parts, with mystery . . . We like to go to the movies, sit down, and let someone take over the controls. And all the promotional campaigns in the world cannot make pudding into roses. Gatsby is the proof of that.
•
The party was just great.
They gave you enough caviar. The waiters wore white gloves. The plates from which we supped hadn’t been brought out since Queen Elizabeth had been there in 1966. They gave us pheasant and something so good that none of us could figure out what it was. It was halfway between asparagus and potatoes. Or maybe it was gnocchi.
Dessert was flaming! (Once someone derided me by saying, “Eve likes champagne cocktails and everything flaming.” But it’s true.)
Cindy Williams, the star of American Graffiti and The Conversation, my friend Cindy, sat at our table nearer to Fred than I (she’s much more manageable).
After a tirade of untold brilliance in the limo about what was the matter with Gatsby, Francis didn’t mention it again, and the caviar seemed to cheer him up. It certainly cheered me up.
5. THE STREET
They took over Sixth Street between A and B and turned it into New York, 1918.
The attention to detail was marvelous. The pushcarts, the dogs, the goats, the chickens, the horses, the ancient cars, the newspaper racks with all 1918 newspapers on them, some in Italian . . .
(On a day when I wasn’t there, seven hundred extras had filled the re-created street dressed in immigrant clothes and the three most important items on that extra call were:
1. No tweezed eyebrows.
2. No dyed hair.
3. No nose jobs.)
Since the most difficult way to shoot the particular scene they were doing would have required a two-hundred-foot-long dolly shot, they decided to do it that way.
Robert De Niro, playing Marlon Brando as a young man, looked less peevish than most actors who have to wait and wait and wait and wait. Debbie (Fred’s assistant) and I huddled together and watched and I brought my camera so I wouldn’t be too bored.
Francis strolled around throwing chocolate-covered almonds into everyone’s mouth.
•
“It’s just a crime, anyway,” I said to Francis. “Just when The Conversation comes out, Pauline Kael has to stop writing for The New Yorker.”
“Who is that other one, anyway?” someone asked. A New York sharpy interviewer who knew everything said, “It’s that Penelope Gilliatt woman. She and Canby from the Times go and sit and neck during screenings.”
“Really,” I said. “Aren’t they a little old?”
“Eve,” Francis said, “Take me away from all this. Take me to some little apartment where I can write all day and dawdle around in the kitchen and when you come home from work I’d make you a nice dinner.”
“Yeah, but would you wash the dishes?”
“You wanna know something?” Francis replied. “More men wash dishes in America than women. That’s a fact. It’s true.”
I believed him. I don’t know where he got that information but I believed him. So, I said, “So, I’d go work all day and you’d get to stay home and write?”
“Yeah. In fact, that was the best time of my life one time when I had a setup like that.”
“So why’d you blow it?” I asked.
A production assistant poked his head in. “Newt wants to talk to you about tomorrow.”
“Why?” Francis asked.
“Because if it’s raining we shoot inside and if not we shoot outside.”
“Good,” Francis said. “Tell him ‘good.’ Why does he have to ask me these questions? . . . Why can’t I just have a little apartment somewhere and do nothing? . . .”
The phone rang. Francis picked it up himself. There are no buttons on these phones in Francis’s and Fred’s offices. There is one phone for Fred in the Moviola room and one phone for Francis. There are no secretaries. When a phone rings, whoever’s nearest picks it up.
“. . . Yeah, this is him,” Francis said over the phone. “. . .You just saw it, huh? . . . Well, it’s a funny thing about The Conversation, because a lot of different people saw it and I think that each person should decide their own ending . . . In fact I rather like it when people see it a whole different way from the way I thought it was . . .”
The conversation went on, a conversation about The Conversation; someone who’d obviously just been to see the movie was calling up to find out what it was all about. It went on for twenty minutes. Francis wouldn’t budge. He would not tell whoever it was what the movie they had just seen was about.
“Golly,” Fred said when the phone was finally put down. “Who was that?”
“Some chick says she’s from The New Yorker. . .” Francis replied. “Gilliato or something like that.”
“Oh, no,” the New York sharpy said. “And you mean she’s calling you to . . .”
(A half hour later, I heard someone say, she phoned again for the shooting script. I wonder if she’ll ever find out.)
Francis sat back. The phones had stopped ringing.
“What’d you do yesterday?” Fred asked.
“Oh, nothing,” Francis replied. “I just sort of hung around in the morning and then, oh, yeah, I watched five hours of dailies. The whole picture that we’ve got so far. It was really interesting, watching it. There are just a couple of scenes that need to be reshot. And then there’s the scene with the lullaby that I’m going to make a lot stronger. I thought it was too corny, you know, at first, to have Vito Corleone go straight from killing that guy in the white suit into singing a lullaby for Michael and holding him in his arms—the kids are the wrong ages on that by the way but we’re going to fudge. . . . But it has to be strong because we go straight from there into Michael Corleone holding his own baby in arms, and we’re going to segue that by thematic music so we give Michael some character because he’s such an executive in this one you don’t know who he is . . . De Niro is stealing the picture because his character is so much more defined . . .”
•
The street on the Lower East Side which The Godfather, Part II has taken over is almost completely movie-ized—almost, but not completely. Two dark little bars are still open, in which real people sit drinking real drinks. One is Ukrainian and the other is Puerto Rican and they are always open, Hollywood or not.
The locals are madly eclectic. There are the real faces, the real children of Ellis Island, the faces that you see in those Museum of Modern Art photographs from 1911. Then there are the sharp young black men, young guys with high, high platform shoes. There are the transvestites from David Bowieland. There are the beautiful leftover hippie mothers with sons who look like daughters. There are the omnipresent limousine drivers who grow familiar and important for they are the means of escape.
All the people who were not “principals” or in the extra business had to scoot away into the bars or hallways whenever Newt said, “Now anyone who’s not in this scene back away, please . . .” or “Anyone wearing modern glasses, take them off, please . . .” or “Would you mind getting that dog off the dolly tracks, he’s going to get killed standing there . . .”
My hair, which I had only recently bleached a kind of shocking fox color (I went to the Godfather Christmas party and no one paid the slightest bit of attention to anyone but blonds so I decided to go orange and finish them off once and for all), my hair and my fox collar and my green shoes and my Brownie had become notorious within an hour of my arrival and I was known as: “Did you see that girl with the red hair and the green shoes and the Brownie?”
“Let me try that Brownie,” Francis said, stretching for another interminable stretch of waiting. “How do you do it?”
Everyone I let try that camera that day did better than Francis. He took a picture of me, only it was mostly sky and, well . . .
“What’s the matter with you,
anyway?” I asked. “Don’t you know a thing about cameras?”
“No, I don’t,” he said, and handed me back my Brownie.
6. CANNES
The Conversation was the last film to slip in under the wire at the Cannes Film Festival and so Francis and his entourage went, while I returned to Hollywood. I learned that Paramount was so mad that the rain had made everything take longer on The Godfather, Part II that they canceled their original offer to provide room and board for some of the actors in France, but Fred Roos had already notified a bunch of people that their future in Cannes was secure (if only they got there themselves—Paramount wasn’t going to pay for no flights, mind you). So Fred, I heard, had to pay for everything. It couldn’t have sat well with him, having to pay for actors’ room and board himself. (The one time he ever took me out for a legitimate dinner in Los Angeles, where we went all by ourselves without the rest of the A-list, he took me to his favorite restaurant, which turned out to be a Mexican one without dash or fervor and the bill came to $4.06.)
One day, I went over to the Paramount offices in Beverly Hills and mailed out Xerox copies of my chapter about the filming in New York to them all. I noticed that page 29 was missing and I realized that I’d gone from page 28 to 30 and neglected 29 altogether. It occurred to me to mention that there was no page 29, but I forgot. I was hungry and it was lunchtime.
The phone rang one night, a few days later, and the connection was scratchy and far away. A man’s voice said, “You don’t know me exactly . . . Are you Eve Babitz?”
“Yeah?” I said suspiciously.
“Well, my name is Victor Ramos and I . . .”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, “you’re doing something on the Godfather movie aren’t you?”
“Yes,” he said, “and I’m in Cannes and I don’t know how to tell you this . . . But . . . Well, I was reading your New York piece and I . . .”
My immediate reaction was, This guy’s calling to tell me they’re suing me and that if I should so much as allow another soul to see anything I’ve written about Francis, they’d clap me into jail.
“What’s the matter with it?” I asked.
“Well, Fred wanted me to call you even though I don’t know you because . . .”
“What!? Come on. Tell me!”
“Page twenty-nine is missing and Fred wants to kill me.”
“There is no page twenty-nine,” I said.
“There is no page twenty-nine?”
“No . . . There isn’t one. I forgot about page twenty-nine. There isn’t one.”
“You mean I just spent $34 to find out there isn’t one?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Ah . . . Fred wants to talk to you. Hold on a second,” Victor Ramos said. “The piece by the way is really very funny.”
I had to wait for Fred Roos, as usual. I could hear his voice in the background all the way from Cannes making me wait.
“What happened to page twenty-nine?” he said when he finally came on the line.
“I forgot it. There is no page twenty-nine.”
“What have you got against the number twenty-nine? You don’t like that number or what?”
“When are you coming back?”
“Well, tomorrow I go to London for three days and then . . .”
“When are you coming back to L.A.?”
“Do you miss me?”
“Yeah, when are you coming back?”
“The first two weeks in June, sometime.”
“Terrific. How is it there?”
“I’ll tell you about it when I see you.”
“And can I come up to San Francisco and watch you edit?”
It seemed like the pause had come in again but it was only the poor telephone line. Fred said, “Why don’t you come to Cannes?”
“I’ve got an ulcer,” I explained, “I’m sick.”
“From New York?”
“Yeah, it’s like one of those Evelyn Waugh things where you hear about this little boy getting shot in the foot on game day and casually throughout the book you find out he’s had his leg amputated and then finally he dies . . .”
“What?”
“Nothing. I’m sick.” I wanted to hang up and go back to bed. “I’ll see you then in two or three weeks if it doesn’t rain. And we all miss you.”
“Good.”
7. ANYTHING ELSE IS PREFERABLE
The shooting was finally finished. Everyone who could scattered as far away from the editing as possible.
In San Francisco, Francis has bought a building which is eight stories high, called the Columbus Tower, which used to be a nifty place to rent an office for small, exquisitely hip enterprises but is now, floor by floor, giving way to Moviolas and their more up-to-date counterparts.
In the basement, there is a tiny screening room where they had showed, the day before I got there, the five-hour version of The Godfather, Part II. They had to edit it down to three-and-a-half hours, or maybe just three . . .
An atmosphere of lethargy prevailed.
It may just have been because I arrived there on a Monday and Monday is when Francis doesn’t eat anything all day. It makes him anxious and bored.
(In L.A. a week before at a party, Francis had run into John Milius, who’d just lost thirty-five pounds and was gloating impossibly at his newly trim condition.)
I knew that things had slowed down to a summer-vacation pace because when I got off the plane, expecting to be picked up by some dispensable member of the crew, it was Fred Roos himself who came for me. When the producer comes and gets you at the airport, it’s an empty time.
Three things were supposed to happen while I was there. I was supposed to “watch Francis edit,” and I actually did see him sitting in front of a Moviola at one point. I was supposed to “talk about City”—City being a magazine Francis fell upon and took over to give himself something to worry about in his spare time. And I was supposed to convince everyone that a piece I’d written for City was much better than they’d thought it would be when they asked me to write for them.
Mainly, though, I was just looking forward to the old Godfather razzle-dazzle once again.
Usually, I dread going to San Francisco, because it’s always raining there and it’s always raining anywhere The Godfather, Part II movie is, anyway, and that seemed like fabulous odds that it would be raining when I got there. However, in Los Angeles that week the weather was humid and desperate from a Mexican storm we were experiencing by osmosis. It was ninety-five and wet. I’d rather it were just wet I decided, so I went to San Francisco gratefully.
And somehow San Francisco was bright, gorgeous, not too windy, not foggy, clear, blue, and luxuriously just right.
Of course, this would happen just when everyone had to go into dark little rooms all day and squint at footage on little flickering screens . . .
Fred Roos picked me up in his rented Mustang II and drove it like a dagger through the freeway traffic, asking me gossipy questions and telling me about the five hours of film they’d watched the day before, and I noticed the same uneasy look in his eye he’d had when he’d been worrying about The Conversation. They’d worked on editing that for months and months . . . And I’d read an interview with Francis where he’d confessed that the ending could have been different and that perhaps, if the movie did well in Cannes, more people would go see it.
(The movie did well in Cannes. It won. I don’t know if more people went to see it, though. Fred didn’t either, when I asked him.)
“What am I supposed to do,” I asked. “About watching?”
“Oh, you can just watch,” Fred said, trying to not sound too vague.
My friend Lynzee Klingman is an editor and I’d once watched her for fifteen minutes, which was as much as I could stand. Another time, when I’d worked for a month on Woodstock on the same floor as the editors, it never even occurred to me to watch. It would have been too much like watching a file clerk or . . . well . . . Watching someone make Xerox copies is mo
re exciting and adventurous than watching someone edit.
But I believe that in the middle of all things like movies and wars there comes a point, a time, when everything suddenly falls completely out of control and there is a moment, a day, when chaos is so nearby that anything else is preferable.
Chaos, the eternal human madness-fear (when you have all the power and still it doesn’t work), is usually fixed in Moviolas.
To the editors go the spoils.
England lost World War II. The fact that they won was too obvious. No one liked it much that they won. What happened to Germany was much more interesting.
To the editors go the spoils.
Nobody likes the editing room.
It’s the worst part of art.
Mozart wasn’t being too funny when he said the most important, important, part of music was “the rest,” the silence. What they cut out. I was just waiting for a place to inject the above. It was written right after I returned from San Francisco and was trying to figure out why suddenly there was no glamour and what would I write about when there was no glamour.
My father once remarked that the reason Francis might have moved to San Francisco was because they both had the same name, but I read in an interview that Francis says he moved to San Francisco because it wasn’t too far from Hollywood but wasn’t in Hollywood. It takes about fifty minutes to fly to Los Angeles from San Francisco and Francis has his own plane so he doesn’t even have to wait in line.
Walking around in North Beach with Francis I could see why he moved there and what he likes about it. There is a strange twist to his personality: that although he likes things grandiose and massive, he likes them grandiose and massive in a personal, Italian kind of way, a way in which the details of the thing stay manageable. There is something very theatrically Italianate about everything he does, a kind of quality I learned to appreciate when I lived in Rome—where even on the most medieval cobblestone street the girl who walks past you wears shoes like a Dior lady.
•
“I kinda like this place,” Francis said painfully, because it was Monday. He looked around and the scale was right for him. I have never felt about San Francisco the way I felt when I was with Francis. I didn’t feel like it was a city I’d never quite understand (the way all native Los Angelenos truly feel). I got the impression that the whole place was one big soundstage. Walking around San Francisco with Francis felt like it must feel to walk around Rome with Fellini.