Was speaking a few weeks ago with my friend David Rensin, about a new book idea he has. "But I don't think you'd write it that way," he said, "being interested as you are, in failure."
David knows me, and he's right. I am fixated on failure, and writing about it. Last night, a chef friend and I talked about a near-tragic figure here in Portland, a chef gifted beyond most, but who is so troubled, I see him tumbling toward the abyss, and that, if and when he does, that will be a story I will want to write. What can I say?
Since blogging earlier today about Virginia Postrel, this paragraph of hers has been whizzing around in my mind:
Everything that works in our lives, from technology to manners to writing techniques, was refined over a long period of time. We don’t know in advance how to do anything, and there’s always room for improvement. Progress is an infinite series. Henry Petroski uses the phrase “form follows failure” to capture this idea. We find improvements by looking at what doesn’t work, trying something we think will be better, and seeing whether in fact it is.
Maybe I have been thinking about this because -- well, not maybe because, but because -- I have in the past few weeks written probably 14 new leads for my book. At least 13 of them are wrong, and every time I go in to try to winnow things down, I wind up writing something else. It's absurd, but I've stopped tearing out my hair because it just is, and I'll get it smoothed out, or I won't.
I did just now go back in, and found something I am fairly sure will not remain, and so will post it here.
Hungry Town
On January 11, 2007, I read a New York Times obituary of a TV writer named Jack Winter. It mentioned his “huge, 10-room apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, which for years was nearly bare except for a piano, a couple of chairs, a bed, a television, piles of rugs and hundreds of frogs, which he collected and kept in a shower stall.” It noted that Winter had had a regular tennis date with former Knicks’ star Earl “the Pearl” Monroe, and quoted the author John Berendt as saying his former Harvard classmate, “never struck me as an eccentric person.” Winters, who died at 64 from what were said to be “health complications,” had early success writing for The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Monkees. But he never liked Hollywood, leaving while still in his 20s, and somewhat later telling the film designer Anton Furst, “The excitement isn’t worth the uncertainty.”
I wrote down this quote for two reasons: I'd left Los Angeles the year before and at the time agreed with Winter’s assessment, and because I’d received a terrible phone call on the day in 1991 that Furst jumped to his death from the roof of Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles. I was in Philadelphia at the time, performing a small part in a movie I would never see, a movie that required I walk down the street topless. I had, in order to take this role, left my one-year-old daughter, who was born at Cedars-Sinai, with my mother in New York, with instructions that she call me only in case of emergency, and that I’d be back in two days.
The film had been fun, and I’d apparently looked good to the French Director of Photography, who’d looked through her lens as I bopped down the sidewalk, dressed as a late 60s suburban girl, with white boots and white eye-shadow and a banged bouffant, and said to my friend the gaffer, who’d gotten me the job, “Nize teeties.”
That night, in my hotel room with some of the crew, the phone rang; it was my mother; my knees gave out: what had happened to my daughter?
“No, she’s fine, it’s Sarah,” she said, of my best friend. “She’s trying to reach you. Someone she works with just committed suicide.”
I called Sarah, in Hollywood, in the house I’d found for her down the street from mine. It was hard to hear her through the crying, but I took it that Furst, whose assistant she’d been on the movie Awakenings, and whom she did not merely admire but loved, had checked into Cedars for exhaustion or depression and maybe substance abuse, went up to the roof and jumped. No one knew why. Sarah did not know why, and now she could not find out, and it was hurting her so much. I told her, I’d be home soon.
I am not implying that Hollywood killed Furst, or that Winter, who continued from New York to write for television and film, including a script polish on Awakenings, was prescient for getting out young. Or maybe I am suggesting the latter; maybe someone posthumously recalled as such a meticulous moneyman he’d returned “with a considerable amount of interest” the money of those who’d invested in a failed play, could not stomach Hollywood’s parsimony, its ratio of consumption to return.
I’m talking about dreams here, not cash, though that, too. And while every civilization is built on the backs of people’s dreams, I do think Los Angeles does so the most directly. Paradoxically, whether your dream comes true is of no consequence. Los Angeles will never say, hey, you’re past your freshness date; get out. Like an understanding hostess, she will make room for you even in reduced circumstances; under the stairs, maybe, but you are of course welcome to watch the paying guests eat, and really, she’d prefer if you did. It makes it that much more festive. And there you are, still part of the action.
Whether the ratio of failure to success in Los Angeles is 100:1, or 1000:1, and what side of the line you stand on, is never quantifiable, because the line keeps moving, because this is what hope does; it moves the line.
In case this is opaque, here’s a real-life scenario: I know an actress who gets new headshots every year (cost #1), despite her last paid acting gig being in 1994. Because she is nearing 50, she gets them retouched (cost #2). Recently, she took part in a one-night showcase of improvisational rhyme (cost #3), with the idea that someone in the audience would take her on as a client (cost #4). She and the other rhymesters sent “save the date” cards (cost #5) and took out an ad in the trades (cost #6). She is also part of the members-only Success Club (cost #7), a group who are said to dance along Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, singing, “I am going to be sucCESSful! I am going to land that JOB!” I haven’t actually seen this, but imagine it might be entertaining, if it weren’t so excruciating.
Excruciation is of course its own form of entertainment, and one in which Hollywood excels. In young blond imports whose peppiness turns to bewilderment, and then bitterness, but who stay nonetheless, for decades, until they find themselves working at a dry cleaners in Laurel Canyon, but the one where Nic Cage drops off his jackets so, you never know. Of nose jobs and boob jobs and platypus lips and calf implants, each an attempt to make you both better than you were and the same as everyone else, a zero sum game for everyone but the plastic surgeons. Of pretty mommies in expensive yoga-wear, their figures identical to their preteen daughters’, who hang back from the counters at the Japanese bubble-tea shops of West Los Angeles, trying and failing to not appear fragile and spacey and altogether ill-equipped to decide whether they’re hungry. And the couple in line, just ahead of me, at the Malaysian restaurant in the Farmers Market, a 50-something woman and her slightly younger gay companion. She, with so much Botox in her face and collagen in her lips she resembled Cesar Romero playing the Joker in the old Batman TV series. He, in a string tank-top that revealed a Schwarzeneggerian chest, a stunning contrast to hair fringed coquettishly above his eyes, eyes that had been surgically stretched between jubilation and terror, the same expression he might have come by naturally had he opened his apartment door at the end of the day and found sixty people yelling, “SURPRISE!” The couple’s bodies might have been politely scanning the overhead menu, but their psyches were cocooned in some existential web, and I, I could not look away, despite and perhaps because doing so made my stomach hurt.
To cite one example of my being one more person eating at Hollywood's table, picking over people's brightest moments and long declines, in order to write about them.
And of myself, as evidenced by the book's new title: Leaving Los Angeles: A Story of Lust, Fame, Failure and Journalism
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Posted by: nancy | June 15, 2007 at 03:12 PM