Company—which specializes in showing films around the clock, seven days a week. There’s always someone chatty in the box office who’ll tell you Robert Redford used to come here when he was a kid.
Though it closed down in 2003 for financial reasons, Aero Theatre opened its doors again the year I came to live in this neighborhood, after complete refurbishment, and instantly became one of those cultural venues the municipality of Santa Monica loves to show off in television ads or leaflets aimed at every resident. It was in this pleasantly intimate establishment that I rediscovered Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, and was introduced for the first time to the Suicide Bridge of Pasadena in the scene in which “the Tramp,” played by Chaplin himself, comes to the rescue of a young woman accompanied by her child, who is just about to jump to her death from the bridge. The Kid came out in 1921, and it was proof that cinema sometimes echoes reality: Suicide Bridge was in fact where many Americans ended their lives when faced with the hardships of the economic crisis of the 1930s. Today, as a precaution, there are barriers to stop visitors from following in the footsteps of these unhappy souls, the most famous of which was the British-American actor, presenter, and model Sam Sarpong, who died in 2015 at age forty. Despite the efforts of his family and the Los Angeles fire department to dissuade him from committing the irrevocable, he threw himself off Suicide Bridge and into the void. Followers of certain television series had enjoyed his appearances on Bones and 24, and in the year of his death, he had been cast in American Crime Story. Which is where I bring this digression to a close . . .
A haunted house?
Saddened by our visit to Suicide Bridge, you might have wondered if all our outings would share the same sinister atmosphere. I’d have smiled, thinking you might rather have gone to gaze at the sumptuous buildings of Beverly Hills. Quite understandably—it’s what everyone does when they first set foot in Los Angeles. Personally, I hate that kind of outing: you might as well read celebrity magazines; at least they’re more informative.
No, we wouldn’t have gone looking for such and such an actor’s house. We’d have gone to the “Witch’s House” (or Spadena House), at 516 North Walden Drive, in Beverly Hills. More shivers down the spine? No, let’s just say I’m fascinated by this house, which was originally built in Culver City in 1921 by the film director Harry Oliver, then transferred to Beverly Hills in 1934. Its irregular architecture—the wooden frame with misshapen windows, the gardens stocked with gnarled trees, the bridge (another bridge!) crossing over a ditch—all offer the visitor a unique experience, along with the feeling of being a character in a book of fairy stories, as when the house was still in Culver City and used as a setting for silent movies. Today it is a private residence that can be rented for short leases, and many Californians still believe it was built by one of the seven dwarves from Snow White, or that one of its former occupants reappears at Halloween dressed as a witch, handing out sweets to children . . .
I’d have understood if, after visiting these “scary” locations, you’d felt the need to relax in the evening and immerse yourself in the night scene to see how Californians party. We’d have gone to the Circle Bar on Main Street, in Santa Monica, a short distance from Venice. This bar-cum-discotheque, which dates back to the 1940s, is considered one of the trendiest on the west side of Los Angeles. There you’d have met young people from every corner of the States, hoping to be spotted by people in the business. Customers cluster around the centerpiece of the interior, an oval-shaped bar, discussing ideas for stories or adaptations, or simply hanging out in the hope of glimpsing some celebrity, before launching onto the crowded dance floor. What with the old photos on the walls and glaring lights, you’d have been astonished to learn that Jim Morrison and Truman Capote were regulars here . . .
A real writer?
I mention the Circle Bar because I have special memories of it, and whenever I go back there, I am reminded of an experience I had a few years ago that was rather odd, to say the least. I think it might make you smile—at least I hope it will.
Back then, I had a female novelist friend who was writing a book set in Los Angeles. She was spending ten days or so in town, and I have to tell you she did not stop for one minute; she wanted to see everything, do everything, photograph everything, to gather as much material as possible and get all her facts exactly right. She didn’t have a driver’s license, so she took the bus, walked for miles, got lost, called me for help, and often I’d discover her in districts that were completely new to me. She had, to put it mildly, a loathing of discotheques, because you had to dance, and she was paralyzed at the thought of dancing. I’d had quite a job persuading her to come with me to the Circle Bar, and as soon as we stepped inside she took up her seat at the bar, firmly planted on her high stool, giving off the message to any potential suitor that no way was she cutting through the crowd to go and make a fool of herself on the dance floor.
She had warned me in advance:
“If anyone asks me to dance, I will deliberately tread on their toes, and it will be their own fault!”
I didn’t insist. I was on the dance floor, executing the trickiest steps of the ndombolo, the dance of the two Congos, while some people must have been wondering what planet I was from, with my choreography so out of step with most of the other revelers’.
I was concentrating so hard on what I was doing, I lost sight of my novelist friend. I was starting to get worried, when I caught sight of her, surrounded by four young men with biceps that had clearly been blown way out of proportion in the gym. They wore tight T-shirts and were talking to her about screenplays for feature films and television series she might write, which they’d hand on to the greatest film directors in Hollywood.
I was familiar with this kind of pickup line and had advised my friend to take care, not pay too much attention, and avoid being seduced by empty promises. Alas, she was more than a little receptive, and there was a definite spark between her and the four unknown young men.
By the time I suggested we go on somewhere else in the hope of detaching her from the group, it was one in the morning.
“What? You must be kidding! It’s only one in the morning, the bar shuts at two!”
To my utter amazement, she had dashed onto the dance floor and was cutting some moves to the applause of her four admirers.
By now I was feeling pretty impatient and irritated. I left the Circle Bar and went home. Somewhere around three in the morning, I heard a knock on the door. The four Californians were there, with my friend and another woman. The noise level was close to a nocturnal disturbance of the peace, so I decided to shoo the untimely visitors away.
Though at first they resisted, once I threatened to call the forces of law and order, they cleared off, along with the unknown woman. An hour later, my friend told me that the group had taken her overcoat, which she had bought in Germany.
“You know, I really love that coat,” she said. “It cost me my ass. I mean, I just can’t lose it! I’ve got the phone number of the girl who was with us, I’ll call her, please, can we go and get my coat?”
So the next morning, having received a text from the unknown woman giving the address where the group lived, we set out for Pacific Palisades, a quarter of an hour from Santa Monica. The block was quite high up in the hills, the house itself a very modern building with a glass façade, set in a huge park. The doors were wide open, and the whole place was bathed in silence, which we found quite unsettling, especially as there were signs on the grounds that a struggle had taken place. The trunk of the car was half open, which I didn’t find very reassuring, having seen enough films in which dead bodies were hidden in trunks.
We crept up toward the vehicle. The overcoat was there, hooked over the driver’s seat. We grabbed it quickly, ran back to my car, and shot off, waiting until we were safely
