‘Bret says you’re walking clear round LA,’ said Brad.
‘That’s the aim.’
‘Any special reason?’
‘I’m location spotting for a movie about a guy who circumambulates Los Angeles,’ I told him. ‘I originated the script, did the development myself, put together a lot of the finance, then took it to Sony.’ I jabbed a finger towards Lynton. ‘They’ve green-lit the project and I’ll be directing as well.’
‘And starring?’
I really didn’t like this Brad — he was snider than an ill-gotten Madison hidden in a coffee can.
‘Well, no, since you ask — obviously not. I may have some profile as an actor but I’m not that bankable. Leo DiCaprio will be playing me — although he’s gonna need a body double for the walking scenes.’
Brad was smirking and I foresaw that our next exchange would cross the border at Tijuana into outright savagery. Luckily DeGeneres took my elbow and guided me away, throwing over her shoulder, ‘Don’t mind us, guys, there’re some people I’d like David to meet.’
There was Dervla, who as she spoke took strand after strand of her own chestnut hair in her scissoring fingers — as a hairdresser might — and who wondered if I would be interested in her idea: ‘Based on an original phobia of my own — fear of candlesticks.’ And there was Ogden, who had bitten his nails so badly he had to wear ten finger puppets. ‘What’s the pitch?’ He threw his chucklesqueak into the felt mouth of the Mickey Mouse one. ‘I’ll tellya, it’s about a guy who’s nervous, nervous, noy-vuss — set in Manhattan, natch — or at least, on a set of Manhattan crowded with scrumptious twenty-somethings deafened by canned laughter.’ And then there was Artie, who had spent the last thirty years in a remote cabin in Montana obsessively writing and rewriting a movie script about a reclusive anarcho-Luddite who launches a bombing campaign aimed at derailing the relentless reproducibility of technology: ‘I worked on birch bark,’ Artie confided, ‘using a bone stylus and pigments I had extracted from wildflowers. Then, when I finally returned to civilization, I found out about the Unabomber — man, was I pissed — my whole fuckin’ idea stolen for real.’
They were all interesting pitches, yet I found it difficult to concentrate and kept grabbing Coke after Coke from the trays swirling through the smallish crowd. So there was my mounting and gaseous turbulence — and also the disconcerting presence of Susan Atkins’s amputated leg (which, so far as I knew, no one had invited), which kept kicking the guests’ butts, a grim travesty of the murders it would undoubtedly have tried to perform if it could’ve got their necks behind its knee.
‘What’s with the severed leg?’ I asked Ellen. ‘I mean, is it some kind of ironic comment on my walk?’
‘Lighten up, David,’ she said. ‘Think of Atkins’s leg as just another Mac Guffin — like the hands of Orlac.’
‘You’re not gonna graft that thing on to me, lady. I mean, I’ve got enough homicidal tendencies of my own.’
She looked at me with an odd expression, but only said: ‘Shall we go on and have some dinner at the hotel? The others are already there.’
It was then that I noticed that the once-threshing crowd had been landed — the purse seine was empty except for me, Ellen, the leg and the legman. ‘Will you join us?’ I asked Mac, but he only handed me a manila envelope.
‘It’s all in there,’ he said. ‘Everything I could find out; read it later and then call me.’ He snagged Atkins’s leg, which was hopping past, and tucked it under his arm like an umbrella. ‘The sick shit that goes down in this town,’ he muttered as he duck walked in front of us along the chicken run, but I knew his comments weren’t addressed to anyone in particular, just as I also knew that he was as happy as a pig in it.
The evening began to end in the hotel restaurant. We were eating paella made with giant insects, and although the antennae caught in my teeth they didn’t taste too bad. I was sandwiched between a movie lawyer and the teenage wife of a mogul who was fully gravid — it seemed she might give birth at any moment, a baby doll torn bloody from beneath the hem of her baby doll dress. The lawyer was telling me he represented Rutger Hauer — although what that had to do with anything (even Hauer himself) was entirely obscure. Then he said, ‘I live out at the Palisades in a one-storey house. Y’know people aren’t killed by earthquakes at all — they’re killed by houses.’
The evening was killed off by my bungalow. Coming along the path from the pool, I saw that the moon had risen above the billboard advertising The Love Guru, and I cursed myself for my earlier trope: the Mare Ibrium was nothing like a fake beard — Myers’s or anyone else’s.
I sat smoking a Joya de Nicaragua and got out Mac’s report — which turned out to be a photocopy of my own. I leafed through the forty-odd pages, smiling grimly at the smiley faces and scattering cigar ash on the elaborate diagrams. Mac had scrawled a few words across the final page: ‘Copies of this are being widely circulated — if you can’t join ‘em, beat ’em.’
* It was anomalous that no one seemed to be played by anyone else at this gathering, although when I came to reflect on it later there was one exception — Ellen DeGeneres as Stevie Rosenbloom. I cannot account for the veridical nature of the events recounted below, except to suggest that I was thrown by the contrast with the last Hollywood party I’d been to, almost a decade before, at Carrie Fisher’s house. That was a true ‘night of a thousand stars’ — or at least, I think it was. At one point I found myself in the line-up for the chicken gumbo with Rod Stewart, Geena Davis and the entire featured cast of Blake Edwards’s The Party (excluding, of course, Peter Sellers); then later on I asked the crown of Jack Nicholson’s head if: ‘You get out much?’
Being in one space — albeit the sort of hypertrophied living room-cumterrace mandatory for second-generation movie royalty — with that much notoriety could’ve been the beginning of the Syndrome, because, while these faces were as familiar to me as my own (and, in many cases, having examined the play of their features for many hours, far more so), I had the disagreeable sensation that they were not who the world claimed them to be, but rather a bunch of saddo impersonators, scooped up off the sidewalk outside Grauman’s and taken on by Fisher as a job lot to amuse persons unknown who were sitting hidden behind two-way mirrors, snorting cocaine and laughing hysterically.
10. The Virgil of Laurel Canyon
It must have been a hell of night, because when I awoke — tucked as savagely into my bed as I had been by the disapproving nurse at Heath Hospital thirty years before — I found I’d had breast implants done. And not just any breast implants Laura Harring’s. At least, I fantasized that they might be Laura Harring’s breast implants, because when I examined them in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door they had a combination of inelasticity and prominence that reminded me of the improbability of her chest — relative to the slimness of her back — when Harring and Naomi Watts took off their tops to fake love in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive* (2001).
I wondered whether implying that anyone might have had breast implants was libellous — but the alternative — that these were Laura Harring’s actual breasts — was too awful to contemplate. I mean, there was I, idly caressing them, while Harring might well be lying somewhere dreadfully hacked about. In an interview I had read with the actress she said: ‘Life is a beautiful journey. Every episode of my life is like a dream and I am at peace and happy with what life has given me.’ But there was no way she could factor a sadistic double-mastectomy into such a beneficent dream — this was a thieving nightmare. Or had Harring been murdered, her beautiful face beaten to a pulp with a brass statuette of a monkey? If so I was off the hook for libel — but without an alibi for the caesura of the past twelve hours.