night and had taken one look at Jim would have known I was safely aboard a raft heading over Niagara Falls. That night I was twenty-three and a daughter of Hollywood, alive with groupie fervor, wanting to fuck my way through rock’n’roll and drink tequila and take uppers and downers, keeping joints rolled and lit, a regular customer at the clap clinic, a groupie prowling the Sunset Strip, prowling the nights of summer, trying to find someone who promised I should, if I didn’t stay away, only run into trouble, endangering my life.)
“How beautiful,” Lola remarked, dragging out the vowels in beauty so that it lingered in my ears. “How damn well fucking beautiful this man’s face is. And what a man, too. Isn’t that marvelous how he still is a man? A man with that hair and a face – and so beautiful – but there’s no doubt in my mind that he’s heterosexual, not one.”
We stood looking at his photograph like we were always looking at photographs when I visited Lola in San Francisco, and he gazed back – a gaze that meant nothing but trouble. And Jim gazed back at us – only by then I was thirty and he was dead.
“Didn’t he . . .?” she asked.
“In Paris,” I said. “Too.”
“How interesting,” she said pleasantly, turning to a photograph of me when I was ten. “Oh, look,” she cried, “you, when you were still a virgin. To think, I actually knew you when you were seventeen. What was the name of your boyfriend then?”
“Claude,” I said, proud I remembered.
Chapter Three
“YOUR POOR MOTHER,” Lola would remark like a lament throughout the month she stayed with me. Her voice trying to sound shocked but managing only to well up with detached amazement and then vaporize into a mist of nostalgia from the days when Rudolph Valentino’s flaring nostrils in The Sheik, when the flashcard said “Must I be valet as well as lover?” were enough to make her come.
“Every time he said that to her, his nostrils would catch – and I would have to go relieve myself. Both physically and manually . . . I was so involved with that man.”
So it was a lot better than whatever was in New Jersey. And I was a virgin when my parents returned, more or less, but not by the next weekend.
“Spit,” Ophelia concluded, “that’s the whole trick to giving head. Just spit.” She had already showed me how to keep the grip light enough to keep the outer skin moving over the inner part. And she’d showed me how to do it so I didn’t have to count on my mouth except for spit . . . and by Saturday afternoon Claude said it worked.
“That’s fantastic!” he said.
“Oh, it’s just spit,” I said.
“No,” he said, “no really, that is fan-fucking-tastic!”
“Thank you,” I said.
Spit was my specialty. Spit I could understand. Spit was so easy.
Chapter Four
AT THE AGE OF FIVE Lola was brought by her family to California, along with the German silverware, the mahogany tables, the twenty-four dining room chairs, the lace tablecloths, the candelabra, the servants, from the home with a clothes hamper chute where when the cloth used for Kotex in those days was soiled, you just lightly tossed it down the little wall door and one week later it was returned to you nice and clean and neatly folded by some woman who came once a week to launder, a woman nobody ever saw – or at least Lola never even remembered. Until she ran away from home at the age of twenty-six to join a Martha Graham-type traveling modern dance troupe and became radicalized into a Trotskyite, she lived in that house with that furniture and for a long time, though she refused to speak that Berliner German they spoke at home to keep the tone up and the servants in Mars where they belonged in 1911.
It wasn’t as though a lot of German silverware and candelabra weren’t already out in Southern California by the time Hein Vogel, Lola’s westward-destined mother – one of those Jews too elegant to have left before any pogroms squeezed her out like my grandmother’s exit from Kiev – arrived, it was just that most of it was in Pasadena on North Orange Grove Drive. The mansions in Pasadena even today are perfect for trainloads of European treasures brought from the Midwestern fortunes – the Bambols, the Wrigleys – coming to California for “the climate.” Because if you were from the Midwest, and you wanted to breathe air that wasn’t all taken up by the fortunes breathing in the Newport Beach-style mansions, Henry James tablecloths, and already organized society which wasn’t going to let anyone in until endless formalities transpired, then “the climate” of California, the orange groves, the purple mountains’ actual visible majesty – the San Gabriel Mountains there, brightly purple – was a good place for your servants to polish your teapots.
Perhaps Lola’s German Midwestern fortune made from stockings was refused in Pasadena because it was Jewish and that’s why it all had to come to Hollywood and that’s why Lola was raised in the middle of Hollywood during the twenties with Hollywood Boulevard four blocks away; the Hollywood School for Girls, the private school she attended; Jean Harlow sitting next to her in class, Jackie Coogan, the only boy and the school mascot, while at home she was strictly bound to a classic Germany, a Germany of violin practice two hours a day, of culture, of table manners that got Bobby Hall – one of those Panthers of the sixties whom she traveled with when she married Luther, her black second husband – so mad he shot a hole through her dining room ceiling. I mean Lola eating ribs with a knife and fork was just too much for him. But Lola, who was sixty by then, could never have picked something up with her fingers – after all her mother, then ninety-four, was still alive even if it was in Honolulu (that woman really meant West) and even though Lola was now officially into The Movement with a vengeance, she just wasn’t about to not use silverware.
Of course it was nothing to be too much for the Black Panther Party when you’re sixty if you’ve been too much for the Hollywood School for Girls when you were fifteen. She’d go to school there in 1926 dressed in her navy blue middy outfit and wait till school let out to change into a black skirt slit up to her thigh and a lot of blood-red lipstick smashed on the front of her face, so she could go out onto Hollywood Boulevard and try and pick up guys, trying to look older than a schoolgirl yet still unable to quite look old enough by then. Even though the Hollywood School for Girls believed the worst, Lola dropped out before she could graduate so as not to spread sin around the virgins in her class. L.A. It was impossible for her strict German upbringing to stop Lola from being too much. For L.A. women became L.A. women if they got there young enough, no matter what they had been born into.
When Lola was sixteen, her mother gave Lola a Model T Ford, a reward because Lola won the state violin gold medal – though how Lola focused herself into the discipline it takes to practice a violin during the Hollywood School for Girls is simply paradoxical enough for some L.A. woman like her to prove was possible.
The Model T Ford gave her exactly everything. She could drive down Sunset Boulevard, which in 1927 when she began taking the car to the beach wasn’t much of a street at all and still isn’t, though at least today it’s paved.
Lola became a muscle beach aficionado, the top of four layers of musclemen – the girl with her arms raised in graceful triumph, wearing a horrible black wool bathing suit which did purposefully Bermuda shorts-type things to her gorgeous thighs and crowded her 36DD breasts into squashed-out spongecakes. The neckline was modesty itself and it was necklines like these that were probably responsible for people, the minute they could, turning into Jean Harlow by the thirties and letting the devil take the hindmost.
