by Tamra Lucid.
Holly Woodlawn led the way to her new digs on a sunny southern California day. Magenta oleander couldn’t conceal the dry brush hillside above, where the Hollywood sign seemed taller than ever. Helping Holly move didn’t involve lifting furniture. We carried boxes, of clothes, make up, shoes, a few keepsake books and photos.
“Oh, honey, you know me, I am America’s house guest!” Holly quipped, and then once again, right before my eyes, she transformed into a Warhol superstar. The herald of glamour, she walked like a showgirl on the big stage. The promenade up the street with her made our surroundings feel like a movie set. Off the clock, she’d schlep over to my apartment in shorts, flip flops, and a subdued ponytail, to do laundry and chat. But she did not need sequins and mascara to turn on her charisma. Her particular alchemy was the ability to dispel gloom.
Holly had not explained whose house we were about to enter. The house had that neglected look that gets realtors imagining owners ready to downsize. I followed her into the front courtyard she said had once been the porch of wild parties. Now mossy and moldy it was a storage area for items not quite ready to be thrown away. An old chair, miscellaneous bits of decor, and, under a dirty old tarp, things that had been there for way too long.
The oversized wooden front door was slightly ajar, Holly pushed it open. Into the dark house she walked accompanied by sunlight and a warm breeze. As I followed, a bust of Apollo at eye level stared back at me from atop a pedestal. The place had never been luxurious but it looked to have been comfortable, with the casual elegance of a cosmopolitan lifestyle.
“He’s a friend going through a rough time right now.” Holly confirmed my suspicions, explaining that the long time owner of the house had recently passed. His boyfriend, a ballerino, as they call male ballet dancers in Italy, was in mourning.
Two decades earlier the ballerino had been swept off his feet by this sophisticated older man. Romantic dinners at chic restaurants, fabulous premieres, and exclusive parties. Shown off like a Faberge Egg. But now he would be forced to move out, by the mother and brother of the deceased, the legal next of kin, who had never approved.
We found the bereaved ballerino already seriously drunk. Tall and angular with dark hair and an aquiline profile he looked like he could be cast as Nijinski. He forced a smile, his greeting slurred, his bloodshot eyes glaring with grief. Drinking with him, a blonde woman, athletic once, but bearing the rough road map of alcoholism. Holly said she had been a promising ballerina.
We were introduced. They were gracious enough, but they had that habit of the beautiful of condescending to those who are not. They didn’t quite seem to notice me, though Holly brightened their day. It became clear that Holly had been invited to occupy the emptiness in the house. She would cheer everyone up as she poured another round. She’d give a little good advice. Holly was doing her missionary work. She had seen this act play out many times before. She fled to L.A. because so many of her friends had died when AIDS decimated the gay community in New York City. She was no stranger to cheering up the dying, or survivors.
I followed Holly out back into a backyard with a pool. The overgrown plants, broken concrete and cracked stone tiles gave the place the appearance of a condemned motel. The pool had been converted into a pond where beautiful water lilies and lotuses bloomed as if in tribute to the Nile. But they could not compensate for neglect’s chaos.
I wandered down a path obscured by tall plumes of fountain grass. A small chainlink gate hanging off its hinges marked the dominion of uncultivated southern California wilderness. I took a few steps. Sharp seed pods thorned my clothes. From there you could hike right to the bottom of the Hollywood sign. The house, the pool, the scrub brush, all seemed populated by the ghosts of wanton acts. Or were they memories fondly kept alive by the survivors of those times?
When I returned pond side, the ballerino told me the house had belonged to James, an important editor and journalist. That rare writer who actually made enough money to buy a nice house with a pool under the Hollywood sign. Holly pointed out that I was editing a zine. I felt a bit inadequate in comparison, but the ballerino told me to go into the house, down the hall on the right, and into the first room on the left. There I’d find books the man wrote, and magazines full of his articles. They were looking for somebody to pull it all together. The deceased deserved a book of essays. I wandered inside to satisfy my curiosity.
In the room I found a shelf of copies of a book he had written about The Misfits that the New York Times praised. Not Misfits the band, the last film for both Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable. On another shelf a small stack of his other book. It had a noir cover, gray and black against lurid white, lit up by a touch of blue. Transcripts of FBI wiretaps revealed a cryptic world of mob bosses. In the middle of the room was a huge pile of magazines, mostly from the 70s: Playboy, Playgirl, Penthouse and Viva, a lifetime of work, summed up in a funeral mound of fading glossy periodicals.
James had been executive editor for all those magazines. Holly had known him for years. They had probably met at a party at the Factory. James had started out as the Articles Editor at Playboy in the 1960s. He thought up the famous Playboy Interview that gave the magazine its cultural credibility. For the first interview he had somehow managed to get Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. The magazine’s subscriptions doubled.
Some people are born to edit. As a college boy James was the editor of a campus newspaper in Indiana. During World War II he became an editor for the U.S. Army newspaper Stars and Stripes in Europe. From the luxury lifestyle Robb Report to Oui, Hustler, Chic, Platinum, and Film News International, he edited some of the most famous and infamous brands on the newsstands in the late 20th century.
Surreal to hear the ballerino remember his lover’s career. An eavesdropper might have thought he was talking about his father. In the 1950s James was a correspondent for Life Magazine. Then he became Time-Life’s editor in charge of large format books. Later he produced news films for ABC. All that and a long life of partying with the elite of New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. But most dear were the years they spent together, at the end, quiet and lovely. A never ending conversation, when the pool was still turquoise.
I wandered off again, to look at the kitchen. Clean, but neglected, its light switched on felt like an intrusion. I expected cockroaches but saw none. In the living room I gave some water to plants wilting with thirst. I walked on down the hall, glancing into rooms that contained furniture yet felt empty. I wondered if this is what it would feel like to tour an ancient Egyptian tomb.
I went back outside. The ballerino sat by Holly speaking quietly. I was allowed to listen. He told Holly about a recent experience orchestrated by his friends, in the hopes of cheering him up. Like Cleopatra, he had been wrapped up naked in a Persian rug and delivered to the feet of his Caesar, a macho fellow rumored to be Madonna’s landscape architect. A new relationship had begun, but the ballerino had not cheered up.
(Tagging along with Holly a few weeks later I would meet this Caesar. His tall Spanish house on Third Street was beautiful. His book collection I found enviable. One volume stood out. A red book with gilt writing and decorations: Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual. In the rooms I saw, Caesar displayed symbols of Catholic saints and angels. As the shadows grew long in his garden we began to talk about psychic sensitivity. The angels, he said, would speak to him when he worked with plants. I believed it, looking around at the mystical vitality of the garden, where every plant seemed to be not only aware of us but leaning in to hear our conversation. The chattering birds settled down for the night. It was primal and elemental. My appreciation for his treasures touched Caesar. We could hear, in the shadows, James whispering impermanence.)
The quiet pond, the mute concrete, the empty house, drew Holly and the dancers to silence, so I began asking questions. The ballerino reminisced about the early days of his two decade romance. It began when he had been a boy in high school, sneaking out between classes and ballet practice, for clandestine visits with James. Under the bust of Apollo, James would leave money, a little pocket change for the young man. The ballerino understood how others might find the truth damning to his lover’s reputation, but they were in love, he insisted, from the first. Those were different times, he sighed. Holly agreed. Times had changed. Her great eyes grew sad and soulful. She didn’t have to mention the hundreds of friends she had lost.
Then the ballerina told her story. She reminisced about her high school years. She would sneak away with her best friend from dance class to the home of an older man, a notorious trouble maker, for drug fueled three ways. Holly and the dancers smiled wistfully remembering their youthful follies. But their melancholy, it seemed to me, didn’t bode well.
Sometimes nostalgia can turn to desperation. Ballerino and ballerina, reminiscing about the thrill of ballet, dared attempt a jump and lift by the pool. They would have achieved it had they not both been drunk. They showed good form, or the memory it. They had strength. But they had no balance. They fell in a heap, laughing. We hurried over to make sure no one was hurt. Holly resorted to turning on the television in the living room. Soon they were discussing what kind of pizza to order, but hungry cats awaited me back home.
Driving away I remember thinking what a life was once there. The gloss, and the cultural relevancy, now gone, had left people like paper ghosts. How heavy the sadness in that house, a tangible density magnified by alcohol and tears. I thought of slaves waiting to be entombed, ignoring the masons sealing their fates, crying for the loss of pharoah. Every sentence, every sip, every glance, a finality.
Holly would gently wake them from their trance. She would bring them back to the light. She would never lie about the difficult road ahead. She would never judge their slips. Holly had faith. Faith not in one religion but in all religions. Though in one of my favorite portrait photos of her she holds a doll of Isis on her lap. Several times in conversation with me she did call out the name of Ishtar with special relish, and she was no stranger to the ancient Egyptian lioness goddess Sekhmet. After all, Holly first realized she was a drag queen when, as a child in Puerto Rico, she adored a Hollywood actress portraying a pagan priestess on the silver screen.