I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  I had breakfast at lunchtime.

  It’ll take five weeks for my first Tiffany cards to arrive from wherever Tiffany feels is best insofar as engraving is concerned, and in the meantime, I’ve had to write short little notes on ordinary stationery—notes which nevertheless appear to any beholder to have been charmingly composed by the firm hand of one of our country’s less neurotic writers, one of our nation’s leading women who understands tradition and good manners.

  And my lover should be back within the week, thank heaven, because it’s his fault I had to spend $100 on stationery, and I shall fly into a rage, have a hot-fudge sundae, and feel slightly sorry for poor Henry James who had to go all the way to England and change his citizenship when a simple trip to Tiffany’s might have saved him the trouble.

  Vogue

  September 1980

  SKIN DEEP

  A Story

  MY FIRST irrevocable loss with a man was the afternoon in a Mexican jungle when it was raining so greenly it seemed made of lime juice, and my own father absolutely refused to buy me this leopard skin with the bullet hole in its head. I was twelve.

  “But Daddy,” I pointed out in disbelief, “we’ll never see one again.”

  “It’s $24,” he snapped, handsomer than men in those days used to be, “and you spent all your allowance. This is what happens when you don’t save! And besides, you can’t have everything.”

  “But Daddy. . . .” I wept all the way to the end of the green jungle and up onto dry land into New Mexico, where blue corn enchiladas made us all wish for peanut butter even more desperately than we had in Mexico City, where everything made us wish for peanut butter.

  “I’ll never be happy again,” I said, pushing the black tortilla (blue corn looks black on a plate) under a napkin.

  “What would you do with it anyway?” my nine-year-old sister wondered later that night, when we lay in the same motel bed with the horrible highway outside with horrible trucks and I longed for my bedroom in Hollywood—Hollywood where everyone knew you could have everything.

  “Do with it,” I cried. “Lie on it naked when men were in love with me. What do you think?”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Now no one will ever love me,” I moaned.

  “Ever?”

  “Well, they might love me,” I sighed, “but it won’t be right. Nothing will ever be right for me again.”

  And of course it was true, because nobody ever did love me right—or if they did, well, take Buddy for example.

  Buddy Fiore (which everyone pronounced Fury) was the legend by which girls who went to Hollywood High judged cuteness. They’d say, “This guy’s eyelashes were a lot like Buddy’s—his eyes were plain old brown like anyone’s—but his eyelashes. . . .” Or: “We were at Bob’s having hamburgers last night when Buddy drove up in that ice-blue Impala convertible, and Roz thought for sure this time he was going to ask for her number, but he didn’t. When he smiled, I thought I was going to faint.” Or: “From behind I thought it was Buddy, but then I saw he was much shorter. Plus he didn’t have the shoulders.”

  The trouble was I arrived at Hollywood High a year after Buddy had graduated, and because I wasn’t “in” with the sorority girls, I never got invited to parties where guys like Buddy might devastate me in person. And all I wanted—if I couldn’t lie naked on the leopard skin—was for someone like Buddy to buy me a Coke at Bob’s.

  As the hot skies of Hollywood High flashed above in May, and summer drew closer, my best friend, Dulcie, and I grew more and more restless. Here we were, sixteen years old, and still nothing had happened.

  “I know what let’s do today,” Dulcie blurted one morning. We were on our way to school in her moth-eaten Hudson, and it was so smoggy that smoking cigarettes seemed redundant, though we did it anyway.

  “What?” I said.

  “Let’s go to the beach,” she said.

  “You mean ditch school?” I was scandalized.

  “It’s so hot,” she moaned. “We could get tan, go swimming.”

  “Ditch school?” I was still scandalized.

  “Everyone else does it,” she pointed out.

  “Where are our bathing suits?” I wondered.

  “In my trunk. From last summer,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “So let’s,” she said.

  “Well. . . .” I said, “OK.”

  Fun seemed the easiest thing in the world, and if we couldn’t have The Prince, we could at least be sophisticated and jaded and world-weary and ditch school.

  Dulcie began to sing torch songs, and the skies over school were behind us.

  But as we got nearer the beach, the day grew overcast and cold, and by the time we arrived at the poor ocean, it was ridiculous. We were the only two human beings in the Western world in a car in the parking lot in Santa Monica, and even the lifeguards were home watching TV.

  “Well. . . .” Dulcie said, looking around in the icy silence.

  “Maybe it’ll clear up,” I said.

  “I hear you can get tan even when. . . .” Dulcie said doubtfully, because how a ray of sunshine would reach our bodies was beyond us both.

  We doggedly changed into our bathing suits—Dulcie into her adorable pink bikini and me into my Cole of California leopard-skin one-piece that made me look exactly like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. To see me in this suit, in fact, with my long blond hair almost to my waist and breasts so spectacular that to this day I’ve never gotten a traffic ticket, you’d realize that I was cute enough to get in with the popular girls, and it must have been something really demented in my attitude that kept those sororities from having a thing to do with me.

  We threw our towels down on the damp sands of Sorrento Beach and threw our freezing bodies gamely on top, trusting we could get tan even in Iceland.

  “Uh. . . ,” Dulcie said, “let’s not go in, don’t you think?”

  “Go in? Where? The ocean!” I squeaked, “No, let’s not!”

  And with that we both burst into such hysterical laughter that maybe the gods decided to give us a break out of largesse.

  Not that the skies cleared or anything remotely like that. What happened was that suddenly. . . .

  Suddenly a third body was lying next to ours. To mine. A man’s. Beauty.

  “Hi,” he sweetly—like mangos, sweet with exotic impulses—said.

  “Oh, hi,” I said, as nonchalantly as I could, considering I felt like I’d been hit in the solar plexus with a bag of cement. Even his hands were gorgeous.

  “I’m Bud,” he said.

  “Buddy?” I asked.

  “You know me?” he sounded surprised.

  The funny things was, Buddy looked a lot like that leopard—or at least a panther. His cheekbones were so pronounced, and the skin covered his face so tightly, but aglow somehow, that he not only seemed to burn from within but to be constructed of deep pile, like sleek fur. He was a panther. And it was no wonder that girls sometimes called him a tiger—not because of fierceness but because of the way he moved, the way his eyes were set aslant in their sockets, eyes the color of golden lagoons. He was slender as a reed, and his shoulders made a triangle to his narrow waist. And if that wasn’t enough, his legs settled things once and for all. Even his feet were tan, tensile paws. And his hands were the hands of Prince Charming.

  And to think I almost didn’t come.

  “Huh?” I said.

  “You know my name,” he said. By this time, I was so lost in his eyes I wanted to cry from joy. They were why art was invented, to convey just his particular beauty. It never needed to be sunny again as far as I was concerned. Just so long as he smiled.

  I felt my insides had marbleized.

  “I really think you’re cute,” he said. (By this time I was laying on my side so he wasn’t stuck just flirting with my back.) “What’s your phone number?”

  “I don’t have a pen,” I said. There he was in cutoffs; how could he get my phone number? But Dulcie
had a ballpoint in her purse, and he wrote my number on his hand.

  “Is it all right if I call you?” he asked.

  (THAT SMILE—THOSE TEETH—THAT OOOOOH VOICE—NOT FAIR.)

  “Call me? Yes. Tonight!”

  “I can’t tonight,” he said. “Tomorrow night.”

  “OK,” I said.

  “Is it OK if I call you late?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, deciding to sleep with the phone in my room.

  So he rose to his heartbreak-hotel height and vanished into the fog, and I felt like my life had begun.

  “He looks like Elizabeth Taylor,” Dulcie screamed. (For her, guys who looked like Elizabeth Taylor were the only reason to go on.)

  “No he doesn’t,” I said. “James Dean.”

  “James Dean. His hair’s black. He’s got those Elizabeth Taylor eyelashes. James Dean?” (But what did she know.) Let’s just say he looked so much like a leopard skin that all you wanted to do was lie on him naked.

  And that night I slept with the phone in my room, even though he said he wouldn’t call. But he did. He called at 5 a.m. I had slept in my leopard bathing suit for luck.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Buddy?” I said.

  “What are you doing? he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Can I come over?” he asked.

  “Uh. . . .” I said. I slept downstairs, my parents and sister were upstairs, danger was rampant. “You could climb in my window. But you can’t make any noise.” So I told him where I lived, and he was there in fifteen minutes.

  Now, I want you to know that I wasn’t even the kind of girl who ditched school, much less the kind who invited a boy to her room at dawn—I was simply too square. And yet there was Buddy in my virgin bed, enfolding me in his firebird arms.

  Nevertheless, I wouldn’t even let him pull my bathing suit top down. All we did was neck with a vengeance. That’s how square I was. Besides which, I was afraid if I did what he wanted, who would know? No one at Hollywood High would have the least suspicion. And what was the point of Buddy Fury if nobody knew?

  He may have loved me, but it wasn’t right. If it were right, he’d take me to Bob’s in his ice-blue Impala and buy me a chocolate Coke in front of everybody and then, well, who cared if you got pregnant? At least everyone would know it was a holy cause.

  Of course, I never asked him where he was until five in the morning, and for the next three weeks when he kept calling and leaving before my parents woke up, all we did was tangle. For some reason, he let me get away with this—maybe because he loved me.

  What I did in class was pass notes to Dulcie telling her each and every heartbeat, and what happened was I left a note lying on my bedroom floor, where my mother found it and nailed my window shut. Plus I couldn’t sleep with the phone in my room ever again.

  But the very next morning after my window got nailed shut, Dulcie and I were on our way to Snow White’s Café, where we always had our nine cigarettes and hash-brown potatoes before school, when I noticed the headlines on the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, which said: SALOME NILES SUED FOR ADULTERY. And not only had they printed a picture of this gorgeous redheaded movie star, Salome Niles, who did a lot of B movies, but they also printed one of her handsome agent husband, Monte Butler, and what looked like Buddy’s high school yearbook picture. And under these pictures it said that Salome was being sued for being caught one weekend with William Fiore, a nineteen-year-old Hollywood High graduate whom she’d met doing stunts on this movie she was shooting at Universal.

  “Jeez, Evie,” Dulcie said. “Can you believe it?”

  And that day in school all the popular girls looked very huffy and said things like, “How could he like her, she’s so old.” (She was twenty-eight.)

  For months afterwards, I woke up at 5 a.m. armed with a hammer to help him undo the window in case he came back, but he never did.

  Of course, I thought about him, especially once I wasn’t a virgin and men did love me but never quite right (which I attributed to my leopard-skin bathing suit having worn out). But it was hard talking to people about him, because if I ran into some girl from Hollywood High and said, “Remember Buddy Fury,” they’d say, “God, what a dreamboat! You didn’t date him, did you?” And I couldn’t say about him coming in the window because it made me sound—well, it sort of went with how bad my attitude was that I let him climb in the window like I was some backstreet wife.

  Anyway, last week I was standing in line at Ralph’s when I saw this strange-looking Hun in jodhpurs from some WWI movie, with a riding crop. Of course, this particular Ralph’s on Sunset is in the heart of the most peculiar part of Hollywood, where punkers and weirdos and people with bad attitudes like me feel right at home. This was the same Ralph’s that Joan Didion meant when she wrote about standing in line in her bikini and this lady making some remark about indecent exposure. How anyone could be indecently exposed there was up for grabs. The cashiers got so jaded ringing up checkouts that they wouldn’t know what to do in someplace normal. Anyway, I was enjoying the way the Hun stood when I noticed he had hands so beautiful they tore your heart out.

  Then I noticed he was 6'3", and when I saw his profile, I knew he’d have eyes like gold lagoons.

  At that moment he saw me.

  “Eve,” he said, twenty years later.

  “Buddy,” I said.

  “I . . . uh . . . missed you,” he said.

  “You never came back,” I said.

  “I called,” he said, “but no one answered.”

  “Oh,” I said. (It never occurred to either of us that he could call at any time but 5 a.m.)

  “Where do you live?” he asked.

  I had walked to Ralph’s, so we got into his silver Ferrari and drove the two blocks back to the little bungalow court where I live in the back of all this wisteria and night-blooming jasmine.

  He was still unbelievably beautiful, only now his hair was neon silver, and as he draped himself across my couch, I sensed the smell of Sea & Ski—which was how he always smelled—fill the air, and my insides marbleized.

  He was Grace itself.

  “The thing was,” he said, pouring us both some wine which we forgot about, “I would go see her [Salome] and then leave and come see you. I really liked you, you know. After I met you, you were all I thought about. But things were really crazy with the divorce, and she wanted me to drive her Rolls from Rome to L.A. . . .”

  “Drive it?”

  “Well, you know, go pick it up. . . .” he said offhandedly. “And we wound up there in Rome, but I really couldn’t stand being so far from L.A. But by then, two years had gone by. I stopped by your house, but you weren’t there.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I never stopped thinking about you.”

  “Me either,” I said.

  And with that, he swooped on me like a firebird and wrapped me in his silken arms. Our clothes were off in two seconds, and for the next few hours, we mangled the past and intensified the moment in such heat that I wondered if life were really like this—love done right.

  Maybe he was just a stud.

  Or maybe it was just me he burst into such flames over.

  Now I was older and wiser. But not much wiser.

  If I had done it then, would he have stayed? Knowing men, I don’t think so. On the other hand, maybe a virgin was worth more than a movie star. Even in Hollywood, where movie stars have such an edge. They say that L.A. is a shallow place. That people fall in love for stupid reasons like looks, and that beauty doesn’t count, it’s only skin deep.

  And I suppose finding Buddy again was no reason to just go straight home to bed with him. But somehow, it was the right thing to do. It made up, somehow, for the lime juice jungle and the irrevocable loss of leopard skin of things past.

  He says when he’s done with this movie (he’s got his own stunt company now—what he’s doing for this movie is jumping out of planes), he’ll take me to Bob’s and buy me
anything I want.

  But the really great thing is yesterday morning he stopped by at 5 a.m. on his way to the studio with this illegal leopard skin he found somewhere for me. It doesn’t have a bullet hole in its head, but even in Hollywood you can’t have everything, so I guess my father was right.

  L.A. Style

  September 1985

  OUT OF THE WOODS

  WHENEVER I think about James Woods, it is either as the affront he was in Split Image, where he plays the cure almost worse than the disease for a family who wants to have their kid deprogrammed from some Moonie-type cult, or else—and this is worse, especially since I was about to go to the Beverly Hills Hotel for one of those “interview breakfasts” in broad daylight—or else I see him hovering over Deborah Harry in Videodrome, helping her indulge her decadent, perverted taste for pain, sticking long needles through her earlobes, licking drops of blood as she slinks orgasmically beneath his hot breath, his hot eyes, his hotness—his coldness. Even Pauline Kael calls him James “the Snake” Woods.

  “He’s such a sleaze, Eve,” says the only woman I know who’s immune to him. “He’s like the only guy in the eighth grade who knew about sex.”

  “But someone had to,” I reply, thinking of the moment in Videodrome when James Woods spots this TV show of torture that at first he flinches from, but from which he cannot turn away.

  Which is exactly how I feel about him.

  •

  The Polo Lounge (or the room right next to it where they serve their gardeny breakfast) is graced by ladies in pink outfits to match the pink tablecloths and pinkness of the Beverly Hills Hotel since time began. However, most of the patrons are in the movie business with a vengeance not to be denied. If you like this kind of thing, then the Polo Lounge is it.

  He arrives looking like something fresh, aslant in the sunlight and breakfast shadows of an L.A. morning. His clothes are light, his feet are light, and his expression is blank. He seems as capable of being blown out the door as a tumbleweed.