September 13, 2008
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Chapter 26 |
WHAT A BIOGRAPHY SHOULD BE, said Albert Goldman, is ”a study of character. What I want from a biography," he told me, "is a sense of intimacy with the subject. I really want to know what it feels like to stand next to this guy, you know, to talk to him. Was he a bastard, was he overbearing, was he modest? What are the vibes he sent out? I think biography is vibes. That's what I find missing: That people in biographies often aren't real, they aren't alive, they aren't present. I would say it's like the difference between chronicle and history. In chronicle you have everything that happens; in history you understand it. That really important thing in biography, the critical thing, is that you have the pitch of the subject; it's like a tone, it's like a keynote. There has to be a certain keynote; it's like a key to music. And that's the key of this subject, of this personality." In Albert's spacious Columbus Square apartment fueled by incessant bottles of Evian and the occasional joint, we had lengthy talks about the tricks of his trade. While in England I had already done research for his book about John Lennon, and I pointed out that most of the people I'd interviewed on his behalf imposed their own vision on their narrative... "Invariably, they are making themselves sound more interesting." So you always have to make an allowance for that? "Well, you always have to bear in mind that this isn't something they're doing consciously" Albert explained. "Many people lead other people to believe that they have an importance in someone's life that they don't really have." I told him that some of the people I tried to interview, wouldn't talk to me because they claimed that Albert had unfairly massacred Elvis in his most notorious tome. He looked at me with weary resignation as if he had heard it all so many times before, as indeed he had.
"Let me ask you something" he said patiently. "If you discovered all kinds of sleazy things about somebody whose life you were trying to explain, would you sweep them under the rug, pretend you hadn't heard them? My own impression was that some of the people who were most critical of Albert's Elvis book, were people who had never read it, but so revered Elvis that an attack on him seemed like an attack on their own self-esteem. And anyway some of the criticisms of Albert had been silly, such as the allegation that he didn't know much about music. Not only had he taught the subject at Columbia, but he had been a student of Darius Milhaud, and his writings had included a book about Wagner and articles for everything from Vogue to Commentary about Thelonius Monk, the Modern Jazz Quartet, the Bolshoi Ballet, Bach, Mozart, Indian dance, Arthur Schnabel, Leonard Bernstein, Beethoven, Nashville, Zoot Sims, Benny Goodman, Dylan, Bo Diddley, Carly Simon, Johann Strauss and Charlie Parker. This was someone who didn’t know music? He was among the first people to write about John Lennon, recalling the startling impression the latter had made, when Albert traipsed up to New York's Regency Hotel to interview him for the Sunday edition of The New York Times. "He answered the door dressed in white pajamas and led me into the bedroom where he got back into bed with Yoko. They both looked pale and spectral with their white impassive faces framed by great bunches of hair. He spoke fluently but never moved a muscle. After a while I wanted to pull back the covers to see if his head was still attached to his body. She said virtually nothing throughout the entire interview. "In those days I was strictly a music critic; consequently, the conversation was largely confined to his records. I could kill myself today when I think of the opportunities I wasted, to get into themes to which later I was to devote years of wearying work and worry." The interview never ran because the Times was scooped by Rolling Stone. "I should have gone back for something fresh, as compensation for being blown away, but I have never been aggressive as an interviewer, which is my greatest defect in my present career. I can't squeeze people and I am too proud to pester them." To my suggestion that maybe it was inevitable that if you thoroughly investigated somebody's life you'd be bound to dig up some dirt, he replied with the observation that, of course, everybody has something in their life of which they’re not proud.
WHEN I BEGAN to work for biographer Albert Goldman on his books about John Lennon and Jim Morrison (the latter unfinished at Albert's death) my skills in researching took giant strides. Albert, whose bestsellers about Elvis, Lenny Bruce and marihuana had all been controversial, was a great advocate of the fly-on-the-wall school of reporting, meaning that when interviewing somebody about earlier events, it was essential to take meticulous notes about the surroundings and the context of what he was talking about. Did you ask him what shape was the room? What color were the drapes?' were the kind of questions Albert would ask when I presented him with somebody's tape-recorded recollections. He also gave me some advice about when (if) I ever wrote a biography of my own instead of merely helping him with his. "Be sure to pick somebody with a lot of facets," he said, "or you'll find yourself getting bored very quickly." And, of course, a subject who was dead was a great improvement over a live one, about whom witnesses tended to be overly cautious. "Biography works best in a very limited time zone. In other words, it's like certain fruits or vegetables; you have to pick the crop when it's ripe. There's a moment, an ideal moment for the harvest. The ideal moment in biography is after the man is dead-you must have the subject dead because as long as he's living he's in a position to suppress a great deal of the truth...(and) until you see how a life turns out you are in no position to judge that life. But then you can't let it go too long because you must have his contemporaries, his friends, and his lovers. You must have someone who was in close contact with him." Albert's definition of what biography ought to be was...'A study of character.' Talking of a potential interviewee, he instructed: "Most important, get him to describe best he can the personalities of each Beatle but especially John. Very important we get an idea of how they interacted. THE GREATEST SINGLE FAILURE OF MY BOOK IS ITS INABIITY TO TAKE YOU INTO A ROOM WITH THE BEATLES AND LET YOU SEE THEM RELATING TO EACH OTHER WITH NO CONSCIOUSNESS OF ANYBODY ELSE. THIS IS THE GAPING HOLE IN THE MIDDLE OF MY MURAL. IT DRIVES ME CRAZY.” These were the capitalized thoughts that steamed off Albert's typewriter. "Don't rush this thing; retard it if possible so as to allow each part a chance to round off. Avoid, if possible, noisy pubs and backgrounds that fuck up the tape. Tell him to buy some booze and take it home. Explain how hard it is to work in a noisy ambience or one with weird acoustics. Be sure to push the machine up close and make sure the machine is in shape with fresh batteries. Be sure to get a signed release”. And, about another development he wrote: "This is a bit of luck for us because so many Beatles themes have already been worked to death. This guy is fresh. What he will crave most is simply respect, acknowledgement that he is part of a history and was once a star. Tell him that we will give him a bit of a go in this book that everyone will read. Also, find out if he has any records he could play and you could tape on the spot. Put your machine close to the speaker, it will do a good job. I am very eager to have his opinion of the Beatles as they were at that time. What was their style? Who were they copying? What did they think was hip? What did he think when it was clear they were heading to the top? "Oh yes, and get him to describe that van in detail so we can picture how the lads traveled. I am sure that they made with the jokes and bits while this poor bloke did most of the work. Just think, the oldest of the lot, Lennon was only 20, George was about 26. This was their time on the road. It must have been a green tour. How did he ever get them into shape to back him up? Amateurs don't adapt so quickly. I am keen to hear this tale." One week later, on February 11, Albert reported that he'd completed negotiations for an extension on his book's due date "after some very nasty threats from the new head of Bantam, Linda Grey. "These new lady execs are the worst people to deal with; they are so insecure and unripe for their positions that they refuse to make decisions, push off their problems on others and then finally pull out a pistol and hold you up...in sheer terror for their own asses! In any case, the pact is sealed if not signed and I am free to kill myself for another six months...” As he got further into the biography, Albert found himself referring back to earlier interviews, which now seemed to him to play a more significant part in the puzzle. "(Michael Boyer) strikes me as in important source. Trouble with the original interview is that it was not sufficiently detailed, and it was not sequential. We need to know in detail how they related, so as to inspire John to characterize him as the only friend he made in London...a remarkable statement. If John Lennon had said that about me I would want to put into his biography, as much information as I could about our relation and why I thought John was so keen on me. Also give a characterization of Boyer as you see him; what sort of bloke is he? John, you know, did not believe in friendship. He said that people had need of one another for this or that purpose and when the need was filled, the relationship was over...I note that Boyer stipulated that nothing be quoted from his interview without his approval; we shall be happy to run anything by him that we use. The important thing is to get him talking in a way that is quotable. Incidentally, never hesitate to stand drinks or spend whatever is necessary to make our sources eloquent. Just get a receipt..." "Bear in mind that Lennon was a compulsive talker who never stopped running his mouth no matter the condition of his mind. Even verging on unconsciousness he would talk on relentlessly. The problem I have encountered is finding someone who can remember what he said. It is not the words we are seeking to recover but the themes, the drift, the rhetoric...what the man had on his mind. "(We could use) a good interior photo of the (Ad Lib) club and another of the famous elevator, where John had a terrible time one night on acid. See if you can learn whether the light was white or red...(Also) a little hand-drawn floor plan of the club so that the spatial relations are clear. Approximate dimensions would help and dance floor size...A word about what was visible outside the windows in the surrounding area. "If you can get to see Larry Parnes try to arrange matters so that you can page through his scrapbook and copy some goodies. What I would love to have is a picture of Parnes at the height of his fame with his acts. Also a biography put together either by his office or some journalist. Very important to capture his personality. Was he loud or brash? Quiet and calculating? Lower class putting on airs? Perhaps the most important thing you could ask him is what led to the triumph of Merseyside as opposed to the London rock that he had developed with his Elvis spin-offs...we are facing here the triumph of the group over the solo star..." What Albert repeated in letters and audiotapes to me was the persistence of the "hole in the center of the book" which he defined as a lack of information about what the Beatles did and said during their numerous nights at the AdLib and other hangouts. They socialized with so many people on these occasions, he pointed out, but finding credible witnesses had proved to be almost impossible.
"We have done splendidly with everything but the years of fame in London. How the Beatles could have been at one and the same time so famous and so public and yet so concealed beats me. Night after night they sat in those clubs and drank and talked and behaved as men do when they are stoned. There should be a wealth of anecdotes one could collect from those years of heedless babbling; but nary a story comes back. I have never seen anything like it. They must have had some kind of human tape eraser." And in a 1985 letter dated January 25 he wrote: "I am dismayed that so much time, work and money has produced so little in the way of finished copy but all that I can say is that getting to the bottom of this story has been the hardest task of my lifetime...take my word for it, Lennon is a bitch". Looking back now through scores of his letters and transcripts of some of the talks we had, I realize that the choice of writing about Lennon may not even have been his. "You know I haven't been a totally free agent about the subjects I've chosen," he said once, "because I have to make a living out of this thing and there might be somebody I want to write about that the world doesn't want to read about. So I've had to go toward the people that the world is infatuated with and what you find about these people often is that their lies were not in themselves very fulfilled by their lives. "Elvis and John Lennon were both themselves very frustrated by their lives. They both had this feeling like, Why can't I have more? Why can't I be better off" I mean, God knows everybody loves me, etc. etc., so why isn't there more satisfaction? It's characteristic of these people that they aren't focused, they don't have any real goals, they don't have self-definition that would enable them to fulfill themselves. It's their problem." Albert was a first-rate biographer, a great teacher and a much nicer person than people give him credit for. He was a generous employer, highly appreciative of his helpers and never stinted to share credit with them. In the fall of that year, he expressed his gratitude for all the assistance I had provided. "I am writing to thank you for all your efforts on behalf of the book, which, I know well, entailed a lot of frustration and embarrassment from the bitter Brits. Imagine one professional journalist telling another that his inquiries were 'impertinent.' Only the English can talk that kind of crap and not feel fools." He congratulated me on one particular interview. "I thought you were most charming with the old crock and drew him out like an accomplished cellist plying his bow on a poor instrument. Nice style...you sounded a bit breathless on the tape at times. Are you getting enough exercise? You should try to find some errands that demand footwork. At our age the heart goes flabby and it is necessary to give it a workout."
AROUND THE TIME I was working for Albert I was fortunate to meet a publicity man named Dana who enrolled me in what proved to be a fascinating gig: Traveling in Venezuela, which is the title of the book that resulted from it. Not long after Venezuela discovered vast, hitherto-unknown sources of oil, the government of Carlos Andres Perez set up a Publications Commission empowered to produce a shelf of books to counter what they felt was a general lack of information about their country. "Isn't it somewhere near Brazil?" was what more than one bonehead had asked, and with the country’s tourist office such ignorance rankled. Dana had been hired to find somebody suitable to write one of the books about the country, and he found me. The Publications Commission even paid for me to make an exploratory visit, accompanied by Rona as my interpreter. We liked what we saw and on my return I immediately sighed a contract and prepared to go back and work on the book itself. At this point I met Estela, a hip black teenager with a ring through her nose who claimed to have spent the last few months sharing the back of a huge limousine with a coke dealer. She had been so close to High Times founder Tom Forçade that she had accompanied him, she said, on his honeymoon with Gabrielle. She demanded I take her with me to Venezuela where she proposed to act as translator and when I demurred said she was willing to pay her own way. It was hardly an opportunity I could afford to pass up, although I was innocently unaware of the sexual demands that would be made by a vigorous teenager, and nonplussed by her threats to tell my friends on my return that I wouldn’t fuck her enough. Looking back now I can hardly credit my low-level performance. But, of course, there was a lot of work to be done and Estela’s need to translate was minimal. She had summarized her earlier life as an era of "cocks, cunt, coke, cars and cameras" but declared that now she was 19 it was entirely over. She was quick-witted, highly intelligent and clearly a bundle of erotic energy. On her promise to eschew any drugs whatsoever, I accepted, her generous offer and a few days after arriving in Caracas accompanied my (black) guide to meet her arriving at the airport. The look on his face was memorable as, not surprisingly, the whole trip turned out to be.
Estela proved to be an amazingly competent and insightful translator. She was shrewd about where we went and the attitudes of the government guides who accompanied us, and the longer the trip lasted the more I realized how hard it would have been to do the book without her. As often as not the tourist people with whom we were traveling would forget that she spoke Spanish and conduct indiscreet conversations in the car about various drug smuggling activities going on around us (although not necessarily their own). In Venezuela we visited the single most outstanding sight in all my years of traveling: Angel Falls whose uninterrupted plume of water drops 1,840 feet, 11 times the height of Niagara. Named after an American barnstorming pilot Jimmy Angel who crash-landed his plane atop the 3,000ft mesa in 1937, it sits at the end of a 20-mile valley, reachable only after a two-day trip up the river Carrao from Canaima. Airliners bound for Bolivar sometimes make a diversion down the valley and back to give passengers a view of the Falls, but we were flown there by army helicopter. It circled above the river a mile or two from the falls and I wondered nervously what would happen if it came down in this apparent wilderness where only an unbroken blanket of trees would break its fall.
But come down it did, in a patch of low brush about the size of a golf tee beside the frothing river. No sooner had we alighted than a woodsman named Fidel Blanco materialized and led us through the woods to his camp, a large structure of poles and canvas with a corrugated iron roof and other poles lashed together to form benches and tables. Several 'rooms' created by hanging canvas sheets were where visitors stayed when they came up the river by boat to make the final land trek to the foot of the falls. Back home in New York, the book completed, it was Estela who first drew my attention to a regular Washington Square performer who called himself the ex-Swami X ("I'm listed in Who's Who as 'what's that?') and who was always a consummate laugh-getter with that hard-to-please audience. One of his bits most rapturously received concerned how you don't have to be black to be a nigger, or to be white to be a honky. "A nigger is a man or woman of any color who values truth, love, beauty and freedom above beer, hypocrisy, conformity and the Republican party. The distinction between a Negro and a nigger: a Negro is eating third-class watermelon while a nigger is eating first-class pussy". Regrettably, I never saw Estela again. She probably went back to playmates nearer to her own age, and undoubtedly men with more stamina. AROUND THE EARLY Eighties, as I mentioned earlier, I had decided that what I most missed about the U.S. was not just New York but the American way of life, the ease with which everything could be done, the frivolous attitude about virtually everything and the way everything changed all the time. There was always something to catch your attention, change the direction of your vision--foreshadowing perhaps the annoying way that anchormen are always being shifted to another camera (but delightful to see when they take the cue a split second too late). So it was that that had prompted my return to America: New York seemed to have passed out of my stratosphere. (How odd that even an amorphous thing such as "the art scene" can be priced out of reach). What had drawn me to America in the first place was the bohemian reputation of Greenwich Village (and "the art scene" was its modern equivalent) so why not follow the universal American dream, and start a new life in California, especially Southern California. I had never forgotten Skip Weshner's rhetorical, "What does it matter where you go man? Just get in the car and go". To drive a car in Los Angeles is to enter a parallel universe for most New Yorkers. Suddenly, you're master of your fate, a mobile explorer roaming through an endless vista of sunny streets, cocooned in a sound chamber of deliriously off-the-wall opinions, or the music of your choice. It's a whole new world, with even the billboards, for example, being a sort of semaphore, conveying trends, opinions one-liners. BUT RUNNING THROUGH a life in New York is the persuasive undercurrent: There's no place like here, the center of the civilized world. If I leave here I'm opting for a second-class life. Every New Yorker is brain-washed daily with this mantra so the almost universal assumption when you tell everybody you're going to pack up and go west is, "So of course you'll go to San Francisco?" In the opinion of most New Yorkers, LA is full of bubbleheads and narcissists. So I went north to Herb Caen's Baghdad by the Bay and spent a penurious summer unable to find writing assignments at any of the area's publications and going through continual, rude rejections (or no response at all) from autocratic minions with few skills beyond hauteur. It seemed to be such a cliquey place; outsiders not welcome. I lived mostly in the gloomy cellar of my friend John Bryan (the editor with whom I'd run the Los Angeles Free Press for a while) and we found solace in a beatnik-style café off Mission. the city's equivalent of Manhattan's early Figaro cafe, a place of intensely comfortable hippie-ness. One of my oldest friends, Alex (“Sasha”) Besher had been living in San Francisco for years so I asked him about what had happened to him after our first encounter when we had collaborated on Japan’s first underground paper, the Shinjuku Sutra. ”Well” he said, “it was in Tokyo that I got mixed up in the cultural kind of art weird world. There were the first proto Japanese hippies; I wouldn’t even call them hippies. The American Beat poet Gary Snyder was active and it was pretty much he who unified these people, who called themselves tribes. The most famous of them was the Red Crow tribe, the Akakarasu Buzoku tribe. They hung out in Shinjuku at the Fugetsudo and I got to be friends with them. They were living in weird communal places like ramshackle Japanese Inns with torn up tatami mats, just kind of very communal; they’d have their flow of foreign visitors from places like London. People that worked for the Beatles would show up and be the dignitary for the week or whatever. ”He dragged me into the office, grilled me about the Shinjuku Sutra and you. Apparently they had received an official complaint from Japan’s Ministry of Education, of course they threatened to expel me, they called my parents, threatened to sue them, all that kind of stuff. That was my first tangle with the establishment. I didn’t want to deal with any drunken Jesuits so that was the early demise of the Shinjuku Sutra.
“But then I got to know people; you know artists, photographers, poets and got to meet Meredith Weatherby who was a publisher of John Weatherhill, great publisher. Got involved in some book projects with him. He would give me some raw Haiku that somebody had translated for a book and allow me to go to work on it. Then I got involved with another very colorful character, Jay Gluck. He was an oddball character, who’d been all around the world, apparently had spent time in Iran and somehow got a gig, very lucrative with the Oxford University Press (Survey of Persian Art), which is a classic in its field, monumental encyclopedic collections. He leveraged that into all kinds of business deals with the Shah’s people and what not and that was a great big feather in his cap. I remember my next step in the publishing world was I was a proofreader for the survey of Persian Art. I learned a lot, well, I don’t know what I learned but anyway that was another step into the publishing world and then after I graduated from University I followed my girlfriend at the time; her father was a professor at the University of Chicago. So I ended up in Hyde Park, in Chicago just hating the place, the weather, everything about it was oppressive. Hyde Park was a little Ivory Tower ghetto with all its gargoyles and what not. I got my first job at the University Chicago Press in the Journals Division”. His life had certainly improved since, I observed, keenly aware that San Francisco was one of everybody’s ideal places in which to live. And by this time, more than 30 years after our first meeting he’d married twice, had a lovely wife, and produced a trio of futuristic books (Rim, Mir and Chi) which had taken full advantage of his Asian expertise. ”I always felt like being a writer”, he continued, “but I had no idea what I would write about, a writer with no material. I was basically an empty canvas, you know, I had no idea. Then I moved to the University Chicago Press the Books Division where I became a copywriter and I would have to read all these books and summarize them and then I did a year of graduate work at the University of Chicago in Russian literature, it meant nothing, I was just interested in it. But I got side tracked becoming the editor in chief of the Chicago Review, which is a literary quality publisher…it’s been around 80 years now. They were the first ones to publish William Burrough’s, Naked Lunch. From there I got the idea, well there’s a lot of interesting material out there and having come from Japan, I started introducing contemporary Japanese poetry and literature in these issues and before I knew it I hit on establishing a small press which was the Chicago Review Press, with a partner who funded it all, he had the money. “I didn’t want to turn a day older than Nabokov by the time I finished my first novel so my first novel was called Ninja and I remember sending it out to some New York agencies but nobody knew what Ninja was at the time. Now, everybody and their great grandchild knows what Ninja was. Ten years later Eric Van Lustbaden wrote a book called The Ninja. Sasha had sent me a copy of Rim and what I now remember the most about it was that it seemed to logically extend everything about the present into a (relatively) near future. The Internet was in its infancy but Sasha had envisioned it as a cyber replica of today’s life with all feuding and fighting between, say, the Klu Klux Klan or the KGB continuing their fighting in this imaginary world. I was impressed with his concept of being able to send avatars into this world to live an imaginary dream-like life. It seemed so far out. I never imagined that what he was writing was literally what subsequently happened. What had been the reaction to all this prognosticating, I wanted to know. “Well, I’ve been influenced by, you know, I’ve been ghettoized and put in a science fiction genre. I don’t read science fiction, it doesn’t appeal to me, its hard science, boring stuff or George Lucas space troopers or what not. No interest to me at all. What is of interest to me is the movement of the culture and from living in Japan the almost prime evil history, study, application of consciousness. This kind of psycho spiritual dynamic, I’m not sure about the spiritualism at the moment, but certainly that. So, I was fascinated by the convergence of technology and consciousness. My earliest influences were… you know practically the only science fiction book I have ever read is William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and that blew me away and Arthur C. Clark’s Childhood’s End. Of course, Zen. That about covers it. And then there was a film, Bladerunner, very edgy… JW: Right, which I never understood. “Well, you know, I think that’s part of its charm and I think that it’s impossible to understand really anything. That’s the extent of our knowledge, the extent of the knowledge of a wise man is that you can’t really understand anything anyway, then you get into a level of a certain kind of acceptance and wisdom hopefully flows from there. On a later visit, I found him putting the finishing touches to his trilogy about the Pacific Rim—Rim, Mir and Chi—which demonstrated on the way the world was headed. Forecasting a cyber world in which was duplicated all the best and worst of this one, he accurately predicted the kind of scenario that later became Second Life. Aware that he didn’t care for his writings to be categorized as science fiction, I suggested that maybe he could be defined as a futurist? “I call myself a reformed futurist” he parried, “because in the end futurism is really a linear concept. Futurism means you start in the past, go into the present and keep going into some sort of future. For me, as a reformed futurist, I see past, present and future all being in one simultaneous time streak. Look what science fiction is today. Frankly the genre bores me to death. But consider the best-known writers in the field. After Gibson wrote Neuromance (he wrote) a bunch of other books that became steadily less interesting. In his last book he was writing about the present, his future is in the present. Then you’ve got somebody like Neal Stevenson, the biggest guru for sc-fi fans today. His science fiction takes place in the past, he’s writing historical novels (with everything about space robots and space wars, and hard science and living on Mars and all that kind of stuff which has no appeal to me at all”.
Well, you’ve mentioned Butoh to me occasionally, I said, and it’s mentioned in all your novels. But I’ve never quite understood it, although I know it’s some kind of theatrical form? “It is a theatrical form and so it’s a striking metaphor. A poor definition, I admit, is that Butoh is the dance of darkness. It’s this very, very edgy post-millennial Japanese art form which was created by an artist named Tatsumi Hijikata. He had this epiphany of the typical Butoh as a kind of naked, skeletal body male or female, shaved head, chalk-white body moving in grotesque forms, doing grotesque things which are actually very subliminal and very meaningful and there’s a lot of imagery compressed into it. His epiphany of Butoh, the dance form, was the atomic bomb that fell on Hiroshima. It was like totally encapsulated in this one image of his of the dead and the living, don’t know if you’re dead or alive. That sort of for me morphed or leapfrogged onto my convergence theory about cyberspace or omni space and material reality”. Could the concept that you describe be something that presses or foresees some cataclysmic situation? I ventured, still not entirely clear about what Sasha was explaining to me. “Absolutely. It’s a sort of benign metaphor, a Buddhist metaphor of the muddy pond and the lotus, which sprouts its seed at the bottom of all this muddiness and unclarity and chaos. It rises to the surface and it opens up as a beautiful, beautiful lotus which is a symbol of Buddhism. Butoh I call post-Zen because even for me Zen has become dated and I’m sure people will take me to task for that. Even Zen has become a commodity and is a linear thing, a gimmick and a gag”. How would you define Zen, I asked, so that people would understand it in one sentence? That has got to be one of these things that people throw around without having the faintest idea what they are talking about. “Zen is the sound of the Zen master clapping with one hand. The charm and mystery of Zen is that it defies categorization, which is great. Conventionality gets blown to smithereens or it gets reprocessed into a different kind of conventionality. Anyway Zen is a short circuit of old rational and irrational impulses. For me Butoh is the dance of darkness because we are moving through life, which is actually a form of death. Gibson really opened people’s eyes with Neuromancer, opened the eyes of the world to cyberspace. But his world, his version of cyberspace is a Western one. It’s a carbon copy of this world of reality. In other words people are still driven by sex, greed, drugs, violence and what not, but it’s all in Western clothing”. Okay, now this question would be one you could ask any novelist but it is still very relevant, and that is that in your day-to-day life, the things you come across, the things you read, the things you hear, do they become absorbed noticeably in the stuff you are currently writing, or is it that what you write is so clear in your mind already that you don’t need any extra input? “Well, that’s a double-edged sword because no matter how far out I get into the creation of a new world or fusing different worlds or envisioning things, naturally I’m interpreting and receiving data from the world today. But I like to think that what I do with my work is that I’m not actually projecting the future from the resent, but I’m projecting the present from the future. In other words I try to go into a space—I call it the Z zone—which is a space in time that exists outside of space and time. So it’s not a linear or a chronological piece of history because most so-called futuristic writing, the linear futuristic writing or science fiction writing or fantasy writing is merely an extrapolation of what exists today. What I’m trying to do is get beyond (that) to what lies underneath and where all the stuff is bubbling.” Los Angeles seemed to call and thus I went south, to stay on the couch of my friend Ellie Vera who said we'd turn my show Wait A Minute! into a technically proficient production. I ran into Jay Levin who'd married my assistant Carole years before and had come West to found the LA Weekly. "I'll give you $400 a month to write something; what do you want to write?" he asked, and so I began turning out a fortnightly travel column for the paper, a gig that ended when Kit Rachlis took over as editor and declared travel "not relevant". One of my oldest friends, Paula Matisse, had been working in an art gallery along with Caroline Seebohm when I had first arrived back in the Sixties. Both of them are younger than me but somehow I have always thought of them as my big sisters . At any rate I had bumped into them elsewhere over the years, once in San Tropez when Paula was on her honeymoon and on an especially notable occasion when we were sitting in a coffee shop with Warhol and someone from the factory came in with the good news that Andy's movie had been accepted at Cannes for the first time. Now, freshly here as a newcomer to L.A. it was Paula who nudged me into my next adventure, facilitating my meeting with Eduardo, a hyperactive playboy who was publishing a free weekly called NOW. Its stylish, gaudy cover belied its nondescript content which was parties, models, night-clubs, pr fluff. I told him I could make it "relevant", i.e. containing interesting, informative stories that people would actually read instead of skipping past before they tossed the paper in the garbage. He was interested, but suspicious. How much would all this cost him? My terms were the use of a car and my rent paid somewhere near the office, and he agreed to them readily. We agreed that my services would be a bargain.
We brought in an imaginative Latino art director Gina, who lacking a work permit at the time was willing to work for very much less than she was worth, and for several months produced a highly readable tabloid. Stories about how Hollywood was failing to preserve old movies; the star-studded history of the about-to-be demolished Ambassador Hotel (where Bobby Kennedy was shot); Albert Goldman’s advice on how to be a biographer; Andy Warhol memories; Isadora Allman’s sex advice column, Ask Isadora; how to cure a cold (and how to get to sleep); a review of the musical about Freud running at a Vienna theater; and my regular column appeared in the early issues. I serialized the dialog Martha and I had conducted on How To Be A Travel Writer; picked up Alex Besher’s Pacific Rim column and “explained” what made humor funny. We devoted a couple of pages to travel and two more to art (Christo and Jeanne-Claude's forthcoming umbrella spectacular, and James Boggs' hand drawn money) and wrote several nostalgic pieces about the "old Hollywood" about which readers never seem to tire. It may have been the-greatest-paper-without-an-editorial-budget ever produced but, alas, Eduardo didn't take care of business; he never got around to hiring an advertising staff and spent so much of his time attending parties to promote his fledgling model agency that NOW was neglected. It went belly up after six months, forcing me to find another place to live. In the meantime, my old friend Martha, with whom I'd toured Europe writing books about magical sites, was appointed editor-in-chief of all North American Insight Guides and invited me to produce one about Los Angeles . Arthur Frommer had always emphasized that the problem with marketing travel books was that only a small percentage of people who went to a country could be expected to buy them, and now here was a series, Insight, that were so insightful and pictorial that they were perfect for learning all about a country, state or city without actually having to go there. The books each began with half a dozen essays distilling the essence of a place and then listed all the nitty gritty facts and hotel rates that the visitor needed. "Thought is barred in this city of dreadful joy" Aldous Huxley once wrote about Los Angeles which Raymond Chandler had denigrated as "a big, hardboiled city with no more personality than a paper cup". UNLIKE MANY New Yorkers I had no prejudice about LA. I'd always admired its freewheeling sense of anything-can-happen-here and in common with so many others was captivated by a city that thrived so much on fantasy. LA's best-known history is that of the century-old movie industry and people never tire of hearing all the old legends and scandals recycled again and again. Nor did it take long to twig that what visitors wanted to see most was not surfers or the Pasadena Jet Propulsion Laboratory but...a movie star ! And if that wasn't possible they'd like to see some place where the stars went--or even where such a place once had been. Even the locals, unlike blasé New Yorkers, are star-struck: it goes with the territory. While visiting the old Max Factor museum one day, the curator pointed up the block to a bank at Highland and Hollywood Boulevard and asked: "D'you know what used to be on that corner?" I had done my homework and, yes, I knew that it had been the site of the old Hollywood Hotel from which gossip Louella Parsons had conducted her daily radio show. It had been demolished nearly half a century before. "True", the curator said, "but you know I still see tourists who come and gaze at that corner for five minutes at a time". Santa Monica-born Steve Harvey, a writer for the Los Angeles Times, loved this sort of thing even more than myself and was always featuring it in his column Only in LA. The Hollywood Hotel, he reported, was the scene of Hollywood's shortest marriage on Nov. 5, 1919 when Rudolph Valentino was locked out of his honeymoon suite there by actress Jean Acker whom he'd married only six hours before. Another Hollywood couple, Steve reported, stopped their wedding ceremony for two hours to have rings tattooed onto their fingers. Only in LA, indeed. Valentino, incidentally, used to be listed in the local phone book here along with other such accessible personalities as Wyatt Earp, Cecil B. De Mille, Clark Gable and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In once-informal Beverly Hills, Jack Benny used to answer the door himself at his home on North Roxbury Drive and it was well known that Marlene Dietrich, Jimmy Stewart, Lucille Ball and Greta Garbo all lived only a block or two away.
MY TASK AS writer/editor of the book about LA was how to define this indefinable city. There's No Business but Show Business was an obvious topic as were essays about whacky religions, earthquakes and other natural disasters, body worship and a history of the movies. With the help of a knowledgeable local writer, Nancy Gottesman, I commissioned several stories and devoted myself to exploring the neighborhoods and assembling an essay, Automania: Californians and their Cars.
I was to be no exception to this rule. I set off in my Honda to explore this fabulous city, driving along every boulevard and major street.
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