I'm currently in Paris, which is beautiful and eventful and I'll have much to write/discuss soon.
For now, a boring weather report. It's quite chilly (for this Angeleno) but whenever my maladjusted blood gets to shivering, I remember (fondly) the cozy Gimli fishing shack from less than a month ago and toughen up.
Gimli is just so beautiful. And yes, extremely cold. And that cold plays tricks on me. All I see here is that I apparently must find a way to emulate the hermit in the gatefold of Led Zeppelin IV (this is something I think of often. I don't know why. Insanity.) It's a sad attempt (no lantern? No beard? The stick is all wrong.) but a blizzard can really mess with your head.
My brain just kept repeating the symbols .
I've moved on to "Dont j'ai oublié l'adresse, A Los Angeles, Cent vingt mili' tonns de pétrol' brut, Cent vingt mill' tonn's, Dans le Torrey Canyon." I'll come back to that that later...
Working with yellow wallpaper all around you -- it's impossible.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote her famous story The Yellow Wallpaper based on her own experience -- as a patient suffering the "Rest Cure" and staring at that miserable but supposedly cheerful wallpaper all day -- used the colorful covering as inspiration (if you can call it that) to create her powerful tale about madness, women and creativity. Ever since reading it, I've been fascinated by yellow wallpaper. I notice it everywhere. I even imagine yellow wallpaper.
So after much stress from a simultaneously troublesome and glorious year (thank you, Guy), I felt I needed some sort of well, "Rest Cure" myself, but with the hopes of writing. I holed up in an antique Inn and chose to ... rest. But. I wasn't prepared for the yellow-hued wallpaper. No writing was accomplished -- I never dressed out of my black nightgown those long days, and never wrote a thing. Instead, movies, pictures, masks, crowns, tinsel and noise makers from New Year's Eve were brought out. That was nice. And fun. I actually smiled without caring how freakish my full grin and tangled teeth usually look in photos -- especially and because of that worrisome wallpaper all around me. I fell in love with that winsome wallpaper. But the next day there, I became ill: Yellow wallpaper.
As Perkins wrote:
"It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw -- not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper -- the smell! … The only thing I can think of that it is like, is the color of the paper! A yellow smell."
No, it didn't smell, but it wasn't a soft baby chick, it wasn't a dandelion, it wasn't ... something ... and then it wasn't something else. What was it? It's possible I wanted Gilman's yellow trapped woman to appear. I only hoped it wasn't me. Perhaps it was. The day after obsessively taking these pictures, my eyes are still suffering a severe reaction from, of all things, wrongly prescribed eye drops (Too much staring? I deserve it. I can't produce regular tears ... I want to cry, but they don't flow ... a bizarre, frustrating feelingt). Perfect. An eye sore.No crying. Peeling. Yellow wallpaper. The curious eye issue is slowly getting better. But the doctor says... different drops, heal the ducts, remove the stress. How about some (of course) rest. Yellow wallpaper. (Maybe the wallpaper is actually red.) But, no. Yellow wallpaper.
So, here's the photos. If you look at the last picture presented, multiple images of Jean Arthur appear across my mask. I have no idea how this phantom set of tracers happened. My back was to her as she tried to resist Joel McCrea's charms. Perhaps Jean Arthur's the woman in the yellow wallpaper. A good omen. But I'm not going back to check: Yelllow wallpaper.
Click on lower right side of slide show for full images.
Today in New York City. JFK to Queens to Central Park West. It was late afternoon and I had just gotten my cab from the airport.
I was hungry. I was bleary-eyed. I told my driver I was famished and couldn't wait to get to my hotel.
As you will see, he really wanted me to eat. So he made a pit stop and I deliriously accepted. I was starving. Actually, I was grateful. It was delicious. He was nice.
And so begins my vacation. As they say, only in New York.
I hitchhiked. Once. I was in the seventh grade -- far too young to be exposing myself to the perilous adventures of road-and-thumb. And yet, young enough to believe that the open road could be thrilling, mind expanding, educational -- the way of, as Jack Kerouac said, the “crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way."
I wasn't as sophisticated as Kerouac. I hadn’t read On the Road yet. But I would have glamorized it as such. There had to be a little glamour. I felt the raw and the real and the dark, sometimes with excitement (sometimes with dread) so it was imperative to sprinkle fairy dust in there, somewhere -- even filthy fairy dust. There were too many dingy light bulbs in the world. One had to compensate.
Staring at a long road, cocking your head just the right way, the dirty and the shiny can attain a certain glow. You’ll run into all kinds of broken, gorgeously cinematic sights -- like glimmering colors of shattered glass, curious looking rocks, abandoned cars, abandoned stuffed animals, or most recently for me, abandoned fun parks. My Torino overheating in the hot desert, I pulled my car next to a mysterious building. Spying a fence with a hole big enough to squeeze through I discovered a derelict go-cart/mini-put put golf course complete with a standing lighthouse, its roof perilously close to sliding off, piles of neglected go-carts, and tiny little houses with broken windmills.
Alas, I never saw such a thing when I hitchhiked as a kid. Just candy, creeps and critical elderly folks -- shaking their heads -- bad, stupid girls. I was camping with a friend’s family, stuck somewhere in nowhere-land, Eastern Oregon and we were sick of roughing it. Her parents had us under tent, roasted hot dog, keep-the-watermelon-in-the-stream lockdown. We were itching for action -- innocent action. When we heard about a mini-mart five miles away, we hatched a plan. Not a terribly detailed plan, but a plan, nonetheless. We would walk.
Walking the distance for two 12- year-olds ain’t nothing we figured. And besides, licorice, candy bars and an ice cold Coca Cola awaited. And more importantly, we could ditch her annoying parents.
But how to get back? And at night? “Let’s thumb it,” we said.
I knew it was a tricky predicament. I’d heard a few stories and rented a lot of movies. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hitcher were key don’t-pick-up-the-drifter pictures. My older brother had regaled me with tales from the TV movie Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker the famed (in his eyes) warning of what happens when halter topped, Bundy bait extend their thumb. Through cinema, I understood the dangers of creepy “salesmen” driving from important “conferences,” or thrill kill couples yearning for children, or men fond of goat cheese and slaughterhouses and setting instant photos on fire. They walked among us.
I discussed these various scenarios with my friend, and agreeing we didn’t want to find ourselves next on the Green River Killer’s roster of victims, we came up with some ground rules: No single men (I hadn’t seen Two-Lane Blacktop so...), no young couples, and no groups of guys. We thought (I extended my hands in a cinematic gesture) two words: “Old people.” And trucks. And even better, old people in trucks -- the safest scenario. We’d recline in the vehicle's bed, and if Ma Pa Kettle got any ideas, we’d jump out and head for the woods. But what I pictured looked like something Hank Snow would sing: "I was totin' my pack along the long dusty Winnemucca road, When along came a semi with a high an' canvas-covered load. 'If you're goin' to Winnemucca, Mack, with me you can ride.'"
So after many suspicious pull-overs, all of which we had foreseen (the creepily nice solo guy, the hootin’ and hollerin’ group of men looking for a party, the couples, who probably weren’t all that bad…but I’d heard of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley…), we did indeed score a truck. A truck with not the quaint elderly couple, but an elderly man. A grumpy old man angered that we were hitchhiking in the first place. We sat in the back, munched our Hershey bars and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and let the wind blow through our hair. And laughed. It was all so hilarious. It was great fun. It was great dumb. We were probably lucky. For dramatic purposes, I'm sorry to say nothing bad happened save for
the old guy's condemnation. But we felt like we were in a movie. The good hitchhiking movie. The positive hitchhiking picture.
And one of those good movies was a film I had seen and joked about on our road adventure. Frank Capra’s 1934 screwball It Happened One Night, wherein the sexy hitchhiking tradition of showing a little leg originated with the sassy Claudette Colbert and an amusingly frustrated Clark Gable. I so wanted to show a little leg but a 12-year-old shouldn’t be doing such things. And most certainly when Clark Gable isn’t by your side. Humbert Humbert should not be an option. And Humbert wouldn’t have allowed it either.
But Capra's joyful, sexually charged and whip-smart depression-era movie was on my mind as I stared down the pine-tree lined highway (it should have been Five Easy Pieces). A road movie that’s pure Americana, from the wealthy heiress fleeing her father only to end up on a bus with wise-acre newspaperman Gable, to all the adventures they do and see on the road (charming camping areas, waving to hobos on trains, sleeping on bales of hay and again, hitchhiking) -- this was so beautiful to me. I wanted to crawl into those moments. And I wanted that hitchhiking scene.
I loved it. Gable attempts to teach Colbert the rules of the thumb, while she turns down eating a carrot. Sitting on a split rail fence on the side of a rural road, the classy Colbert allows Gable to pick a piece of hay out of her teeth with a penknife (the raw carrot and hay to penknife always feels so sexy to me), and while he chomps on his carrot, they swap hitchhiking techniques. Gable is full of hitcher braggadocio, even suggesting he intends to write a book entitled: “The Hitchhiker's Hail.” To him there are three ways to hail a car: “It's all in that ol' thumb, see...that ol' thumb never fails. It's all a matter of how you do it, though.” He attempts the varied techniques, but to no success. No one pulls over. “When you get to 100, wake me up,” Colbert quips. After countless cars pass them, she takes charge: “I'll stop a car and I won't use my thumb.”
Out come the gams. Hopping off the fence, she casually walks to the side of the road and oh-so-sexily pulls up her skirt, exposing that famous shapely leg (with garter). Of course, the first approaching car screeches to a halt. While enjoying their ride, away from the dirt and dust, she gloats: “I proved once and for all that the limb is mightier than the thumb.” To which he answers, “Why didn't you take off all your clothes? You could have stopped forty cars.”
My friend and I didn’t stop forty cars. But we stopped more than we should have. And though this wasn’t depression-era Capra land, we loved the short adventure – an adventure that by then had already died out with rotary phones, communes, LSD movies and Charlene Tilton.
Hitchhiking -- I still yearn to try it again – though I’m sure I never will. But all those cars, all those personalities, all that candy, all those…Tom Neals. At 12, I hadn’t yet seen the Edgar G. Ulmer noir masterpiece Detour, (starring a downtrodden, yet handsome Neal and the brilliant, hard-as-nails Ann Savage), but it would cut a deep impression on me later. Perhaps one of the most fatalist hitchhiking movies ever made (there’s others, but I can’t get to them all), had I viewed it that young, I would have pondered that experience. Tom Neal, a cheap hotel room, and a deadly phone cord. A ride.
I would have hitched with him. But I might not be here to talk about it. After all, as Neal wryly asks: “What kind of dames thumb rides? Sunday school teachers?” No, 12-year-olds. And, maybe, though doubtfully, one day again -- me. As long as Clark Gable’s my Sal Paradise.
I was totin' my pack along the long dusty Winnemucca road...
A sparkling oasis in the desert. Rocks, sun, sand, moon, mirrors, glass and gold, gold, gold. Gold brings me happiness. And a black beetle. A black beetle entranced by "What is and What Should Never Be." Who isn't?
I love the train. I hate New Year's Eve parties. Love, minus hate, clickety-clack on the tracks, mountains and snow in the black of night turning to sun and ocean in the light of day, lonesome old whistle, what makes a man wander (sings Waylon). Being by myself in a sleeper car and really sleeping. Perfect. That whistle does do something to my brain.
Greet the day in the parking lot of a pink motel. Close it out in the parking lot of the Pink Elephant Liquor and Deli. And a car wash in between.
November in Hollywood.
Another day in my neighborhood. Driving around this odd, stretched out, old, new, pretty, ugly, pretty, lather, rinse, repeat, what on earth is that, I've never seen that before city.
Halloween viewing at Hugh Hefner's movie night was quite perfectly, The Exorcist. We will all one day, sing together in the white clouds of heaven or rot in hell, I think quite comfortably, in the wonderfully balmy Grotto. Either way, I think we'll be OK -- everyone was sufficiently terrified and moved by the picture to ensure this will happen.
So...naturally, the act of watching Regan stab her privates with a crucifix turned me back into that nice Catholic girl buried deep inside of me (the Catholic girl barely raised Lutheran, but familiar with the church of excessive, sometimes beautiful guilt). That girl.
That Vidal Sassoon sporting, tannis root wearing, black crib rocking girl who makes me long for ritual.That girl who would never, like Ellen Burstyn, abandon a child, even if he had "his father's eyes."
Roman's girl (that's Castevet, and yes Polanski too) and favorite Catholic -- Rosemary Woodhouse.
I saw a very early, special screening of Youth in Revolt at The Playboy Mansion a few Sundays ago and all I can say is...good show. Though it's too early to go into it -- I will say, I enjoyed the clever, offbeat, touching movie (directed by Miguel Arteta)-- and the cast is terrific: Michael Cera (in a dual role), M. Emmett Walsh, Mary Kay Place, Steve Buscemi, Ray Liotta, Fred Willard, Justin Long, and Jean Smart.
Hugh Hefner (a very gracious host) played the picture for his regular weekend movie night, where guests munch popcorn, hang out in the mansion, and in my case, toured the Grotto (as pictured at the top -- I really wanted to call my ex boyfriend on that phone), the Game Room, the Zoo and more. I love the Game Room.
Again, since the movie opens in January, I'm holding off on an official review, so instead I thought I'd post a look into Hef's Game Room. And a picture with one of Hef's ex's (her bust anyway) Barbie Benton, one of the greatest bunnies of all time.
I also met one of Hef's friends, director Elliot Silverstein (above), who was surprised by my gushing reaction upon meeting him. But come on! The man directed Cat Ballou! Mr. Silverstein's ear was bent by my endless questions regarding Jane Fonda, Nat King Cole and Lee Marvin. And yes, there were sexy girls in attendance too. But Robert Culp? And Elliot Silverstein? And monkeys? All ingredients for a memorable evening.
Lovely time. I saw The African Queen the next week. Beautiful. And check out these classic games:
I love the desert. And my car. I used to call my cars my children, but they've since grown up -- fast. For years this Z car was an absolute angel, no problems whatsover, but suddenly, and within the span of one month, all that's changed. Now he's the abusive boyfriend I keep returning to even if he leaves me vulnerable and stranded on the side of the road. But I can't always blame the car. The 105 degree heat of Joshua Tree is not kind to my 1978 Datsun and so he takes it out on me -- a lot. And sometimes I absolutely hate him. In this case, I loved him, thanks to photographer Krissie Gregory and our shoot for my upcoming column in Garage Magazine. Look for it on stands September 1. In the meantime, my car has broken down three times since these pictures were taken.
Nevertheless, here we are, in the desert, in love. Though that little fucker did burn my hand.
Through the heat, the early mornings and my broken down car, the Palm Spring Film Noir Festival remained great fun and a wonderful success. Thanks to the efforts and talents of Marvin Paige, Alan Rode, Foster Hirsch and the great Eddie Muller, the event was a big score. Some excellent pictures were screened, as all noir should be screened, writ large, and I finally got to see another John Garfield (a genius, and one of my favorites) movie on the big screen (The Breaking Point -- one of his greatest, most heart-breaking performances). I also introduced two fascinating pictures -- the incredibly rare Inside Job, starring Ann Rutheford and the final film credit by Tod Browning. I was lucky to interview Ann who hadn't even seen the movie herself. She discussed the film somewhat, but mostly regaled us with wonderful Hollywood stories, like swimming lessons from Buster Crabbe, working with John Wayne, her role in Gone with the Wind and Errol Flynn's monkey.
I also presented the gloriously insane/exceedingly homo-erotic Desert Fury (directed by Lewis Allen) starring Lizabeth Scott, Burt Lancaster, John Hodiak, Wendell Cory and a wonderfully ball-busting Mary Astor. A desert noir where, excuse me, did I say homo-erotic? It was just flat out homosexual. How it passed the censors of the late 1940's is beyond me -- maybe the beauty of the rich, glorious technicolor and Scott's flaming red lips had them sidetracked.
And then... The Bad Seed -- a thrill for me (I've written about the movie too many times to count) with that icon of blonde evil, Patty McCormack as special guest (you have no idea how excited I am in the above photo -- posing with my dark overlord). Her brilliant performance received a standing ovation (the audience was galvanized by her brilliant brat and so thrilled to actually have Rhoda Penmark in the building). Talking with her (she most recently played Pat Nixon in Frost/Nixon) and trying to shield her from the mob of fans, she was relaxed, funny,down to earth and beautiful. More work for Miss McCormack please!
There were more films on the roster, including Vincent Sherman's impressiveve The Garment Jungle (starring Lee J. Cobb, Gia Scala, Richard Boone and a young, strapping Robert Loggia who was in attendance). Loggia was very honest about his career, some of his mistakes, and told an incredibly amusing story about getting his part in David Lynch's Lost Highway. Let's just say his real-life rage towards Lynch worked in his favor. He was also quite the charmer in person.
There was also Robert Siodmak's classic Criss Cross, Jules Dassin amazing Brute Force, Joseph Pevney's Female on the Beach (with Joan Crawford), Richard Fleischer's terrific, gritty Armored Car Robbery, Michael Curtiz's The Breaking Point (the greatest version of Hemingway's's To Have and Have Not -- as agreed by all of us at the festival), and of course Eddie Muller's The Grand Inquisitor, starring the ever talented Marsha Hunt, who also offered a fascinating conversation following the picture (I interviewed her last year, and she is a fountain of knowledge -- in film, in literature, in current events, in fashion -- and she is a hero -- blacklisted by HUAC, she refused to name names). And closing the festival -- Thief -- Michael Mann's splendid, gorgeous neo-noir starring James Caan and love-of-my-life, Tuesday Weld.
Thanks to Eddie, Foster, Alan and Marvin. Thanks to those men who made the cookies at The Chase Hotel. And thanks to all the fans of noir who attended. I love talking to the viewers, and spent many moments in the lobby, in the theater, even in the ladies room discussing noir with audience members. I'll never forget the couple who gave me a birthday card when I let it slip that my birthday was the same day as their son's. You two are the best.
Here's a sample of some of the fest -- sitting with Miss McCormack after taking in The Bad Seed, walking out with Robert Loggia who is being...Robert Loggia. And a snippet of me presenting Desert Fury in coded ways -- not simply saying, this is the most homosexual picture of the 1940's. I didn't want to ruin the surprise.
I love Erskine Caldwell. I have numerous first edition hard covers and lurid paperbacks of his work -- he has the best paperbacks. The Southern writer should be read my every American. And though John Ford tried, no one has made a proper movie version of Tobacco Road. Craig Brewer? Could you get on that?
One of my favorite places in Los Angeles is Clifton's Cafeteria, an establishment I take all of my friends to and eat alone at on many occasions. I love downtown Los Angeles and venture there nearly every weekend. I’ve had people who live here tell me they never go downtown -- they think it’s depressing. Too bad for them. Sure, there’s scores of homeless people, crack addicts and a few creeps (like, you know, in Beverly Hills) but there’s also lots of nice people, lots of bizarre shops and loads of cultural flavor that people hiding out in the "nicer" areas forget about (you don’t see many fake breasts downtown).
There's also, of course, all of the historic architecture (the Bradbury Building just one example) and then my beloved Clifton’s Cafteteria. Opened in 1935, the three story cafeteria located on Broadway (amidst all the beautiful old movie theaters) showcases a redwood forest, a chapel, waterfalls, babbling brooks and an entire upper level adorned with red velvet wallpaper. The food (that I always eat entirely too much of) ranges from delicious to so-so (their deserts are great -- don't let anyone tell you different) but it doesn’t really matter. Finding this kind of old Los Angeles ambience is rare. And I love the Moosehead -- it reminds me of my childhood.
And a serenade? This was one of the greatest restaurant experiences of my life.
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