Polaroids From the Dead

by Douglas Coupland

  Offering tremendous privacy, this authentic hacienda features an inviting courtyard, large family room, formal dining room, breakfast area, and a separate guest house or staff quarters plus cabana.

  Charming details include wood beam ceilings, tile floors and stained-glass windows. The home is suffused with natural light through skylights. Dream-like gardens lead to a pool and spa and cabana. The setting affords privacy just minutes from the heart of Brentwood.

  * * *

  The “ranch-style house” was literally invented in Brentwood, in Sullivan Canyon, by Clifford May. In a New York Times interview he pronounced, “The ranch house was everything a California house should be. It had cross-ventilation, the floor was level with the ground and with the courtyard and with the exterior corridor. It was about sunshine and gracious living.”

  May tried to blur the definition of the inside and the outside. Prominent fireplaces with wood and stone are a dominant theme. Tiling inside and outside his houses minimize indoor/outdoor distinctions; all rooms look outward; sliding glass doors and skylights connect the two realms.

  AP/Wide World Photos

  May’s was an aesthetic idealized and mass-produced in post-WWII booms, deeply winding its way into the popular consciousness of successive generations raised in subdivisions and multiple Bewitched reruns. May is one of the secret, dominant forces of why most Americans quickly and readily are able to embrace “California.”

  AFTERNOON

  Marilyn Monroe was entombed in Westwood, just across the 405 Freeway from Brentwood, at Westwood Memorial Cemetery, 1218 Glendon Avenue, one block south of Wilshire Boulevard’s Golden Mile directly behind the 25-story Wells Fargo Tower, almost 32 years ago. Truman Capote, for whatever the coincidence is worth, is entombed perhaps 250 feet away in the same structure.

  The cemetery, smaller than half a baseball field, is almost empty today, the anniversary of her death. The smooth walls lining its perimeter, like those of the Getty, are built of beige travertine and provide an echo that reminds one of what silence is supposed to be, a difficult task amid the urban roar. The banking tower’s ventilation plant, combined with the thrum of the nearby San Diego Freeway’s rush hour and the roar of traffic and LAPD helicopters makes for a somewhat less than Arcadian environment.

  Monroe’s tomb inserted into the walls of the “Corridor of Memories,” much of which was not built at the time of death, is at stomach height behind two feet of concrete, and is kitty-corner from the Memorial Park’s main office, a Swiss-chalet-Trader-Vic’s-Bank-of-America A-frame hybrid.

  On August 4, 1994, Monroe’s is the cemetery’s only crypt whose marble surface is no longer creamy white. Years of visitors’ rubbing hands have smudged it gray with body oils. The brass of her plaque (MARILYN MONROE 1926–1962) is the only plaque among all neighboring plaques that has been polished clean by thousands of hands talismanically glossing its raised letters over the years, like the front door of a Milanese church. It is the most visited grave in Los Angeles.

  Today the cistern in front contains a dozen red roses. At its feet lie a bouquet of champagne pink roses and a white basket full of white freesia.

  Around 5:00 P.M., a Japanese woman, about 22, with a blotchy complexion and a short, blunt haircut and wearing a sailor-style suit stands gawkishly alone in front of Monroe’s crypt.

  Awkwardly, she reaches out and pats its cool stone and then stands back. Even more cautiously, she leans forward and kisses the stone’s top left corner, leaving behind a small, round, bubble-gum pink lipstick kiss.

  She runs away, covering her mouth with her right hand.

  After her autopsy, Monroe’s hair was soaked in formaldehyde and unstyleable. A wig was borrowed permanently from Fox. Her fair skin, blue from cyanosis, required extraordinary amounts of makeup to re-whiten. She was buried in a lime green Pucci dress with a lime green scarf around her neck.

  GREEN REMAINS A DOMINANT BRENTWOOD COLOR:

  eucalyptus

  tennis court

  road signage

  citrus

  dying lawn (khaki)

  thriving lawn (bluegrass)

  pear

  fig

  Jaguar

  rubber tree

  military green postboxes

  Jeep Cherokee

  On the radio it is announced that QVC-TV auctioned studio photos taken by Bert Stern six weeks before Monroe’s death, her last studio photo session. Home shoppers were able to purchase photos that Monroe had herself desecrated along with that same photo, “de-desecrated” via computer. Top price obtained: $7,900.

  Back in Brentwood, and just outsde the Union 76 station at the corner of Bundy and San Vicente, a donation of a dollar, say, purchases you a photocopied sheet of “Poems for Nicole Simpson” by a local street entrepreneur wearing a felt-tip-pen-on-cardboard sign saying: MORE POEMS ABOUT NICOLE SIMPSON. Business is brisk. Locals say, “At least he’s offering something original and new.”

  On San Vicente Boulevard, dark rumors float about Brentwood’s no-fat cafes, phone machines and the brightly lit aisles of the Vicente Market—rumors too dark, too dreadful to mention, for to speak the word is to give life, and who will spawn this monster?

  Perhaps these rumors are true. Perhaps time will tell. Perhaps it will all be forgotten.

  Meanwhile, to hinder the “lookie-loo’s,” thru-traffic is blocked on both sides of Dorothy. An LAPD officer beside his motorcycle keeps traffic flowing.

  The front of the alleyway in which the bodies of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman were found has been screened off by a dozen or so dwarf maples still inside their black PVC nursery tubs. It is further hidden by previous plantings of Australian tree ferns and Nile lilies behind a new enclosure of green-plasticated chain-link fence that separates the walkway from the sidewalk (this part of Brentwood has sidewalks).

  Signs put up by agitated neighbors saying “GET A LIFE” and “GO HOME THERE IS NOTHING 2 SEE” have been taken down. By August 4, late afternoon traffic no longer concertinas to a grind the way it did in the initial sensationalist frenzy of a few weeks ago. But it still slows down.

  There are a few joggers and dog walkers—Brentwood’s only two species of residential pedestrian—and all are wearing Walkmans.

  It was a dogwalker who first found the murdered bodies.

  AP/Wide World Photos

  LATE AFTERNOON

  It is now approaching sunset time. We think back to August 4, 1962: This is the night, 32 years ago, when Marilyn Monroe tried to decide. “Will I or won’t I take the pills?” (or perhaps others speaking the words, “How will we administer the poison?”).

  Brentwood dreaming, dreaming whether or not to live or die.

  The cul-de-sac behind her old house at 12305 Fifth Helena, but a bone’s throw from the old house of Raymond Chandler, is silent. There are desiccated lemons strewn on gravel, bird of paradise clippings in the trash bin, a Washingtonia palm with a frazzled, untrimmed skirt, gardeners’ pickup trucks, an air-conditioning company van and day lilies.

  Around 7:00 P.M., while walking amid the streets of Brentwood from the old Monroe neighborhood up to Rockingham, one observes the arcana of upper-middle-class Californiana: skateboard stickers on top of the Stop signs; picket fences; plentiful bottle-brush trees in bloom; the smell of lilies and roses; random pockets of deep silence; security cameras silently rotating as they scan pedestrians en passant; brick and mortar mounds bound for the landfill; domestic help leaving late for the day; mourning doves cooing on the telephone lines.

  The air is cleaner now than it would have been in 1962. There are more cars in 1994, but they pollute less than when pre-unleaded tanks spewed blue smoke into the sky like lawnmowers. But there is undeniably more noise: crickets; drowsy songbirds; the whistling wings of startled, escaping doves who have been enjoying the end-of-day heat on the asphalt; the cawing of crows in the cedar deodorus; the drone of pool filters—these are the eternal sounds. But the traffic on Sunset a third of a mile
up the hill would certainly not have been so loud in 1962 as it is tonight, nor would there have been the helicopters—LAPD copters, radio trafficopters and the tabloid and TV copters zooming in above Rockingham, even still, weeks later.

  To appear “well maintained” in Brentwood is, of course, a beyond-discussion ultradesirable West Coast pursuit: firm, symmetrical blemish-free bodies. As the London Sunday Times’s Culture magazine stated, California represents the “democratization of beauty.”

  Yet rarely, if ever, is the question asked of the body-obsessed, “Just what is it you expect to get from your body? What is it you want your body to do for you that it isn’t doing for you right now?”

  Nicole Brown Simpson was a body fanatic, 5’8”, 125 lbs.; she was homecoming queen in Dana Point, California; she jogged three miles a day; she ate only low/no-fat food and attended gyms regularly.

  Like Monroe, Nicole Brown Simpson was intensely aware of her power over men, and well aware of her ability to pick and choose partners as she pleased. Her white Ferrari, won in her October 1992 divorce case with Simpson, had vanity plates reading L84AD8 (“Late for a date”). Those spurned by Brown Simpson’s attentions grudgingly admit to her almost otherworldly desirability and bear her no ill will. “She had that well-maintained look,” is one comment.

  Gyms, in general, are notorious cash points for steroids and cocaine. It is rare to encounter a gym rat—male or female—without quickly finding somebody with evident emotional difficulties.

  From Makeover magazine, a new publication of People, released the first week of August:

  BRUNETTE TO BLONDE

  A 2½-page spread entitled: Using Marilyn Monroe as the “ultimate blonde” transformation.

  Winners include Madonna, Bette Midler, Iman, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Roseanne Arnold.

  Losers include Julia Roberts, Angelica Huston, Demi Moore, Geena Davis, Delta Burke and, surprisingly, Loni Anderson, whose hair was once described by Bill Griffiths’ cartoon character, Zippy the Pinhead, to “mounds of hardened Cool-Whip.”

  Hello! magazine (UK), August 2, 1994, issue:

  CHILD OF DARKNESS, KATY GREEN: THE POIGNANT STORY

  OF THE TEN-YEAR-OLD BORN TO LIVE IN A TWILIGHT

  WORLD

  Katy Green of Saltney, England, suffers from congenital erythropoietic porphyria (CEP), a condition in which the faintest light, even the moon, television, car headlights, causes her skin to blister, fever, headaches.

  She can only enter the outer world completely hidden, masked and protected. Too many flashbulbs could conceivably, if not kill her, then injure her, cripple her.

  After a while one becomes used to the Brentwood notion of the superior body and superior, invisible infrastructure—as well as a subtly implicit neighborhood attitude that any hierarchy of ideas is, if not corny, then perhaps antique.

  After a certain amount of exposure to the neighborhood, tears elicit only fear, not sympathy…Are you…unglued? Stop crying. After a while, people from elsewhere seem naïve and unarmored. One drives through Pennsylvania, for example, and sees freeway overpasses obviously not up to any State of California seismic code and wonders, “What’s going through their minds—don’t they know?”

  From Dino, a biography of Dean Martin by Nick Tosches:

  Nineteen-fucking-eighty. He had outlived Crosby. He outlived Elvis. He had outlived Terry’s Wonder Dogs. He would outlive them all. He had discovered the secret of happiness.

  “How’s it going?” someone asked him at the Riviera Country Club one day.

  “Beautiful,” he said. “It’s great. I wake up every morning. Massive bowel movement. The Mexican maid makes me some breakfast. Down to the club here. At least nine holes. A nice lunch. Go home, sit by the TV. The Mexican maid makes me a nice dinner. A few drinks. Go to bed. Wake up the next morning. Another massive bowel movement. Beautiful. This is my life.”

  Ten years later, Martin is a walking corpse, drinking himself into the grave nightly at Dan Tana’s on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. For Martin, all narrative rationales have imploded. What’s the point?

  From the menu of Gratis! Fat Free Cuisine on San Vicente Boulevard:

  Bowl of Black Bean Soup (garnished with sour cream unless otherwise requested) $2.95

  Herbed Ricotta Raviolis with Marinara Sauce $7.95

  Side of Mashed Potatoes & Caramelized Onion Gravy $1.75

  Barbecued Zucchini Pizza $6.95

  Raspberry Roulade $2.75

  It has been said that as animals, one factor that sets us apart from all other animals is that our lives need to be stories, narratives, and that when our stories vanish, that is when we feel lost, dangerous, out of control and susceptible to the forces of randomness. It is the process whereby one loses one’s life story: “denarration.”

  Denarration is the technical way of saying, “not having a life.”

  “Scott doesn’t have a life”; “Amber is denarrated.”

  Up until recently, no matter where or when one was born on earth, one’s culture provided one with all components essential for the forging of identity. These components included: religion, family, ideology, class strata, a geography, politics and a sense of living within a historic continuum.

  Suddenly, around ten years ago, with the deluge of electronic and information media into our lives, these stencils within which we trace our lives began to vanish, almost overnight, particularly on the West Coast. It became possible to be alive yet have no religion, no family connections, no ideology, no sense of class location, no politics and no sense of history. Denarrated.

  In a low-information environment, pre-TV, etc., relationships were the only form of entertainment available. Now we have methods of information linkage and control ranging from phone answering machines to the Internet that mediate relationships to the extent that corporeal interaction is now beside the point. As a result, the internal dialogue has been accelerated to whole new planes as regularized daily contact has become an obsolete indulgence.

  The West Coast continues to be a laboratory of denarration. In a very odd sense, the vacuum of nothingness forces the individual either to daily reinvent himself or herself or perish. Therefore it should come as no surprise that, sunny weather aside, Hollywood and the dream-creation apparatus of the twentieth century should locate itself in a planetary locale of relative blackness.

  Q: Who are you this week? This year?

  Denarration seems to be the inevitable end-product of information supersaturation, and because it appears to be an inevitable condition, like a hurricane off the Florida coast, it is not on the moral spectrum.

  Richard Mackson/FPG

  Smugly non-denarrated locales such as Europe, now swamped by media technology taken for granted for decades in North America, now suddenly look to North America for clues or answers as to how to cope with the sensation of personal storylessness. The cautionary tales of Brentwood, where total denarration has been in full swing since the early 1960s (Marilyn) offer examples, and possibly advice.

  Excerpt from a note written by Simpson prior to his Sand Diego Freeway “chase”: “Please think of the real O.J. and not this lost person.”

  Simpson once told Sports Illustrated about fame: “You realize if you’re living an image, you’re just not living.”

  One wonders if sentimentalizing the mid-twentieth-century notion of life seems at worst unproductive. Buying into an untenable 1950s narrative of what “life” is supposed to be can only lead to useless and uncreative expenditures of energy. How are we to know that people with “no lives” aren’t really on the new frontier of human sentience and perception?

  The July 2, 1994, issue of Britain’s celebrity-glorifying glossy magazine Hello! might well be considered the “All-Brentwood-Post-Fame” issue.

  Hello!, famous for the consistently unthreatening stance it takes on the subjects it portrays with multiple, always-flattering color photos (“At Home with Mr. Satan: Lucifer pats his furry pal Cerberus and contemplates life
without love: ‘I’m looking for a full-time relationship, but it’s hard when so many people rely on you.’ Flames add a country touch to the spacious underground home of Mr. Satan, referred to as ‘Bub’ by his many friends”). Fergie happily does Hello! spreads as do many otherwise media-skittish entities.

  Chapter 7. You Fear Involuntary Sedation: The Princess of Wales, in a now-rare public appearance, refusing to look into the camera lens.

  Chapter 7. You Fear Involuntary Sedation & 8. You Can’t Remember What You Chose to Forget: Synopsis of the O. J. Simpson story.

  Archive Photos

  Chapter 9. Technology Will Spare Us the Tedium of Repeating History & 10. How Clear Is Your Vision of Heaven? (cover story): Ex-Mrs. Rod Stewart/George Hamilton, Alana Stewart warmly discusses breast implant-removal trauma and gives readers many glimpses into her stylish Brentwood home. Included are photos of Stewart with her two children by Stewart, Kimberly and Sean, as well as photos taken with her ex-heroin-addict son, Ashley, with a recently broken arm and a facial expression that can be best described as sullen.

  Caption: It was a shock for Alana to learn that her tall and broody son, Ashley, 19 (above), was in intensive care for the second time in a year and a half. Now she’s happy to have him back at home and help him recuperate, only ten months after he flew the coop for a headline wedding and whirlwind marriage to Shannen Doherty.