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Today we plunge into West Hollywood. Which is just like Hollywood,
only gay.
Not entirely, of course, any more than
Castro
Street in San Francisco, but you know what I mean. Drop
down to Santa Monica Boulevard or Melrose and you often see more
same-sex couples than hetero. I once stayed at a hotel on Santa
Monica, and it happened to be Halloween. I heard a commotion from my
10th-floor room, went out on the balcony and saw more
trick-or-treaters than I've ever seen anywhere. Wait a minute, these
weren't kids, they were mostly beautiful women. ... wait a minute
again, they were mostly men dressed up as women. Imagine Mardi Gras
and Key West Fantasy Fest and Chinese New Year all rolled into one.
It was fun to watch. Never saw anything like it until the Gay Pride
Parade down Market Street in SF.
First thing, we stopped at
Greenblatt's for a pastrami
sandwich to go and ate it at the shopping center across the street.
When Chris and I were living on the street, on Sunset, we made a
friend,
Peter Brocco, who had a place in
Laurel Canyon just a few houses up
from the Canyon Store. (He bought it for not much money in the '40s.
I just looked it up, and it would sell now for $1,170,000.) He let
us stay with him quite a few times and was always good for a free
meal. The man could really cook, and he frequently shopped at
Greenblatt's. Back then it had more than deli food, it had fruits
and veggies that were the best in town. Many times I drove him down
the hill to the deli and helped him shop. Pete was getting old
enough that he didn't like to drive, especially backing out into the
perpetual traffic coming down the canyon. Pete was an actor, a bit
player mostly, who began his career in 1932. He was in such films as
The Boy With Green Hair,
Boston Blackie's Chinese Adventure,
Miss Grant Takes Richmond,
The Great Caruso, and
Frances Goes to the Races
(starring
Donald O'Connor and
Francis the talking mule!), but
usually if you blinked you might miss him. He had a fairly large
role in
Jekyll and Hyde ... Together Again.
He was
blacklisted in the '50s for some
bullshit, but seems to have found plenty of work anyway. His credits
include an incredible number of TV series from the early days right
on into the '80s. I saw him quite a few times over the years, when I
came to Hollywood to work. He was gradually going blind. We'd get
together and I'd take him out to dinner. He was thrilled at my movie
career, so I always took him to the best places. Peter died in 1992,
a few weeks short of his 90th birthday. Ah, so many memories sparked
by lunch at Greenblatt's ...
Next in line on memory lane is the
Chateau Marmont. You're probably
heard of it. It's a Hollywood legend, built in 1929.
John Belushi and
Helmut Newton both died there.
Jim Morrison fell out a window and
survived.
Led Zeppelin once rode their
motorcycles through the lobby. The other guests applauded. It's that
kind of place. Expensive (starting at $335/night, these days), yet
laid back. For some reason it's been a tradition for out-of-town
screenwriters to stay there. I stayed there for a couple of weeks.
The suites are nice, with antique rugs and furniture. It may have
been the only hotel in LA with no air conditioning. (Don't know if
it still doesn't have it, but most of the windows are open.) Rock
stars seem to like it, too. Maybe because it provides a more
interesting class of furniture to trash. It is sort of hidden away,
off the strip, so it's been a place for illicit trysts, a place
where stars go to not be seen. I spotted several during my short
stay there.
For many years there was a billboard between the Chateau and the
strip, advertising Las Vegas, with a gigantic showgirl endlessly
rotating.
Gore Vidal wrote about her in
Myra Breckenridge.
Jay Ward Enterprises had the small
building right across the street. One day, a giant statue of
Bullwinkle appeared in his
courtyard, holding Rocky the flying squirrel up in the air, in
exactly the same pose as the showgirl. Bullwinkle is wearing a
Wassamatta U. sweat shirt.
Jay Ward's building is now a dog grooming parlor, but moose and
squirrel are still there.
A little farther down the road is the Cabo Cantina, which Lee
believes is the site of
Woody Allen's misadventures trying
to drive a big car in
Annie Hall. We really ought to see that again and
find out for sure. (Later: I checked, and she's right. 8301 Sunset
Boulevard.) This is the "mixed" part of the Sunset Strip. By that I
mean there are some very expensive places, and some more
down-to-earth. Pretty much all of it is expensive, though. We passed
one hotel whose sign said parking was $5 for 20 minutes, up to a max
of $25. So for that you get less than two hours. Registered guests:
$23. Jeez, how generous!
Then there's Carney's, which bills itself as the best hot dogs in
Los Angeles. Weinershit! The best dogs in LA, as
everyone knows, are at
Pink's, La Brea and Melrose. Try it
someday, but be prepared to wait in line. Sometimes a long line. Try
it at 3 AM; they're open 24 hours a day, and have been there for 75
years. The walls are totally covered with signed photos of famous
people who have eaten there. And it's not just promotional hype.
They really have created the perfect chili-dog.
Then there's the Saddle Ranch, a hot club which looks like it was
pulled up out of Sam's Town in Las Vegas and dumped onto the strip.
They have mechanical bull riding inside and plaster whores standing
around outside. While we walked by we watched a gold
Lamborghini pull in. The young
woman who got out looked like she dressed at
Out of the Closet ... but had
probably spent a grand on her faded jeans.
Then there's the
House of Blues, a giant rusted
sheet-metal shack with valet parking, the
Comedy Store, the Trocadero .. all
sorts of places to meet and be seen. Traffic is a nightmare on
Saturday nights.
We discovered something called Hart House, just off the Boulevard.
It used to belong to
William S. Hart, the first movie
cowboy. He was both a real cowboy and a trained actor, and came to
Hollywood determined to do something about the wildly inaccurate
portrayals of the wild west he'd been seeing in the
Nickelodeons. He
made a lot of films, and they were quite good, but eventually the
public preferred guys in big silly hats like
Tom Mix. Hart also
owned a ranch in Santa Clarita, which is now just across the freeway
from
Magic Mountain. He donated both his homes to the county on the
condition that they be used for the promotion of the arts, and
they're now parks and museums. The one in West Hollywood is used by
the
Actor's Studio ... and a lot of dogs. Part of the grounds is a
"Trial off-leash dog area," in super-progressive West Hollywood, the
only town in Cahleefornia that has outlawed the de-clawing of house
cats. Don't get me wrong, I think city dogs need a place to run (and
screw, if our brief time observing in the park was any indication),
but I'm sure I'll always think of it now as Doggy-Doo Park.
Last stop, the complex intersection where Crescent Heights crosses
Sunset and promptly gets tangled in an indecipherable mess as it
tries to figure out when and where it becomes Laurel Canyon. There
is a point where Laurel Canyon seems to run parallel to itself, and
I know for a fact that if you make the wrong turn you can find
yourself on your way to Santa Monica or heading west on Hollywood
with no place to turn around for many blocks.
This place used to be quite different. There was, and still is, a
triangle of no-man's land in this mess. In the '60s there was a tiny
little building there. Just one room, abandoned, boarded up, and I
have no idea what it used to be. But it was covered with peace signs
and rock concert posters, and permeated with a distinctive smell
that some folks describe as sweet, others as acrid. Smoke, in other
words. Not tobacco smoke. Inside, you might stumble around in the
darkness before finding a square foot of empty space to sit. Then
you could partake of the endless joints being passed around ... or
just inhale. It was that thick. The roaches—yellow
Zig-Zag roaches,
not cockroaches—were thick on the ground outside the windows.
Lookouts would announce approaching police (who we called pigs;
sorry, I never really liked it that much, but I went along), and the
roaches would come flying out. Nobody ever got busted there that I
know of unless they passed out with a pocketful of dope. And nobody
ever walked out un-stoned.
They've widened the road, put in a right-turn lane that almost
obliterates the little triangle. Used to be, the traffic would back
up here like crazy, and Chris and I could peddle our copies of the
Los Angeles Free Press right in the road, and drivers
would have plenty of time to dig out their money. When the papers
were gone we'd go into the Old Dope House and breathe a little.
Okay, maybe we toked a little, too. I suppose a lot of selling was
going on in there, but there was plenty of free stuff going around.
Now it has been reduced to a mingy little gravel-covered
nowhere-in-particular. A couple of shrubs. Would it be so hard to at
least put down a little grass? The lawn kind? It's as if they had
sowed the ground with salt and tried to cleanse even the memory of
the old place and the now-aging hippies who used to groove there ...
and now only pass through with maybe a short pause to remember the
way things used to be, and how we all thought society would have
come to its senses by now and legalized
marijuana. And sigh.
May 5, 2006