That was technically not in L.A. but at a stop for date shakes at Hadley's on the 10 Freeway, the San Bernardino route to Palm Springs, out past the wind farm that took my breath away every time I saw those thousand arms circling crazily over the arid earth. But people talk to strangers in elevators, other customers in a store, standing at a stop light, all friendly and open. I never got used to it.
I did get Los Angeles itself, a tactile place with big light and lots of texture where nature hasn't been conquered. Earthquakes lie in wait, full- blown desert only a hard drought away. Rub the surface of anyone who's been there long enough and you'll find a seeker. It doesn't much matter after what— L.A. is cult nirvana— some sort of god quest over the rainbow, born of that light and an underlying sense that all this gorgeousness can't last. The only thing people in New York City seek, my singer friend Dottie once let me know, is a way out. Dottie did her time in the Big Apple, but she was from Kansas and wide- open space was home to her and that translated into Los Angeles. In her case, her cabaret career faltered. We sort of reversed each other: I was always glad to get back to New York and Joe. I was never going to put down roots in that shallow western soil.
My time in Hollywood— especially my first serious movie— was more like a prolonged in- passing friendship. Mostly I was holding my emotional breath. Joe and me having phone sex, trying hard to keep it real over long distance. Harry giving me no peace, making threats, saying I was hurting my career by not making myself available to the machinery, that I wasn't hungry enough and was being passed over. He said if I wanted things to happen I had to get out there and get dirty.
"You're a Hollywood dame," he harangued. "Look at you, you blossom in the sunlight."
I'll never forget that conversation. It was winter, it was cold and wet. I was wrapping up a part, my ticket home already purchased. "It's been raining in L.A. for three days, Harry."
"Ardennes, Ardennes, Ardennes, when will you come to your senses?"
"I'm a New York– based actor. For the umpteenth time: I'll come out anytime a good part calls, but home is—"
He cut me off with a grunt and a half wave of his left hand, temporarily lifted off its perch on his belly. "Home! With Joe and the two cats, a dark, roach- infested apartment. Are the cats helpful there? Listen to me: What makes a rose more beautiful?" I lifted my hands to say, tell me. "Manure, that's what. Cow shit in the soil. See my point? You gotta taste it, Ardennes, you gotta sacrifice to it morning, noon, and night; you gotta want the prize, and you gotta make the journey to the prize."
What Harry didn't see was that, different as we were, Joe and I overlapped in crucial ways. He could pick up a false note in my work and excise it like a surgeon. And I loved those two cats, Molly and Corot, and our too- small West Side flat. The dark streets of New York were like the veins along my hands, avenues and boulevards in my blood. I held New York close in my heart. "Success at what price, Harry?"
He looked at me from below those heavy lids, scanning my interior, a stone Buddha, arms across his large front. "You think I talk of crass success? Dollar bills falling out of your brassiere, manse in the hills with the saline pool, ego billing on the marquee? You think I don't know you? Craft, Ardennes— A- R- T— is not going to settle for trysts and one- night stands, rendezvous in a bus station. A- R- T wants all of you! And all of you is all I want you to be."
It sounded so enlightened.
"Poetic, Harry," I said. I looked at my watch. "I gotta run, a night shoot today. I'm due on set at four." I stood up, reaching for my purse. I still didn't know why Harry had called me in that day. I was hoping for a month off, time with Joe.
He barely stirred, ever so slightly lifted that left hand again. "You got the part."
"What? You mean Separation and Rain? The lead ?"
Harry nodded sagely. "You start one hour before this part ends. No time to go home and feed the cats."
I whooped, I spun, I clapped my hands. I was young enough to whoop and spin. I was big- eyed, all goals, virgin territory; I was all the places I would never get to that I would strive for until the last breath was out of me. This was big, colossal, this would move the earth: a plum part I knew I was right for, that I wanted badly, that would give me the chance to really show what I knew I had untapped inside me. This was my shot to breathe life into a character half alive on paper; this was my Michelangelo: Adam reaching out to touch the hand of God. Okay, I was not about to be God to some Adam, but I would make that character live. I would! Wouldn't I? I flashed on a memory of Joe and me stretched out on a blanket on the rolling grass of the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. Joe poured wine into a thermos so we wouldn't be caught drinking out in the open. We had a baguette and cheese, and grapes, I think. We were having a what- if- one- of- us- makes- it conversation we had a lot in those days, and Joe said I wouldn't be able to take it anyway if I did make it big. He was tender about it. He knew how uncomfortable strange surroundings can make me, and that too many demands send me into a confused tailspin so I lose my bearings and need to run away. "I should have been a librarian," I told him that day. Joe said, "Nah, not with that face; none of the boys would get any homework done." I smiled at him from my toes up to my heart. "Your home is with me," he said. That was a good moment, the kind that can make up for so much, that ought to be the real essence of being alive but somehow never is.
"Harry, don't fool with me."
Harry's eyelids widened a fraction. "I never fool," he said with mild indignation.
"Then this is real!" I felt my breath catch. "The lead . . ." I sat down. This was a twenty- million- dollar budget with a solid script and a superior director. (I didn't know that day— and it was a few years off— that I would one day be married to Andre Lucerne, perhaps the most demanding director in Hollywood.) "You're sure? Andre Lucerne cast me?" I remember the doubts starting to creep in, that a mistake had been made, a mix- up in head shots or the audition tapes. I even suspected Harry might have bribed the producer, used blackmail, called in a life- and- death favor owed and I would be found out and dismissed as a fraud. I was working up to full- fledged panic when I heard Harry moving.
He lifted his cumbersome frame out of the plush leather desk chair and waddled to a small fridge you wouldn't know was there, tucked beneath some shelves in the well- appointed, screaming- success office. He leaned down heavily and pulled out a split of champagne, and from a nearby cabinet two flutes. "If you didn't have work tonight, we'd celebrate properly at Spago, on the Strip. Will this do for now?" He held up a bottle of Cristal. Spago was the place to be seen; the Cristal cost about what a New York City immigrant garment worker made in a week. He popped the cork and poured out wine and fizz.
I reached blindly for the glass Harry pushed toward me. I'd had my small victories; some— plenty of— actors would say I was in a good place even without this bit of luck, but I suddenly didn't know what to do, didn't know how to handle getting what I wanted. Harry was always saying luck had nothing to do with it, but that's not so; luck is either at work in a person's life or it's not. I sagged backward into the thick cushions of Harry's buffalo- hide sofa and put the flute down on the coffee table. Harry chuckled. I looked up; tears filled my eyes, ready to spill over. " Thank you, Harry," I whispered.
"Don't thank me. All I did was make a few calls, let the world know an angel had descended. You did the rest."
That snapped me back to my senses. I never knew if Harry bought his own lines or not. I jumped up, pointing to the phone on his desk. "I have to tell Joe!"
Harry snorted. "Go ahead, call that chump. You're halfway up the mountain; see if he can't find a way to drag you back down."
I smiled. "Don't ruin it, Harry," I said, reaching for the flute
