Didion and babitz, p.13
Didion and Babitz, page 13
Ertegun wouldn’t quite take over the world. But he would take over the music world when, in 1971, he stole Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones away from Decca Records. Yet while Ertegun was a suit and a shark, a killer by instinct as well as by trade, he was other things, too. He was an art collector, owned paintings by Matisse and Degas and Lichtenstein, murals by Picasso, etchings by Schiele. He was the son of a diplomat, his father Turkey’s ambassador to the United States from 1934 to 1944. And he was the husband of a woman soon to be named to the International Best-Dressed List Hall of Fame. All of which is to say, he wasn’t the usual cigar-chomping, moneygrubbing, music-mogul vulgarian. Rather, he was an impresario-potentate, the Monroe Stahr of rock ’n’ roll. That, at any rate, was how Eve saw him.
Conspirators: Mick Jagger and Ahmet Ertegun.
Laurie took a dimmer view. “I thought Ahmet was horrendous in every way, and I could see nothing about him that anybody could possibly like. His brother Nesuhi, who Eve also knew, was a lot cooler. Ahmet, though, just struck me as a fame caricature. He was ugly, and he couldn’t do anything. But Eve talked about him all the time. I don’t know why except she once said to me that she was physically turned on by money and power.”
Not only by money and power. Ertegun’s irreverence and roguery, his moral indifference, I suspect, attracted her equally. There was laughter in his eyes, but when he grew bored—something he did easily—he also grew cruel. And Eve was, compared to him, an innocent. What’s more, she lacked awareness of her own vulnerability, the ways in which her intelligence made her arrogant and therefore blind. In a letter to Chris Blum, she wrote, “Earl is so nervous about sex that it’s always mysterious and dangerous and he told me that he’s only ever made love with 8 people (we’re all sure Ahmet’s one but Earl will never confess to that).”
If McGrath and Ertegun were indeed lovers or former lovers, then complex duplicities were at play, and the dynamic between them and Eve takes on a Jamesian aspect. It’s The Portrait of a Lady set to rock ’n’ roll. As Isabel Archer was presented to Gilbert Osmond by Madame Merle, Osmond’s former lover, so Eve was presented to Ertegun by McGrath. And like Isabel Archer, Eve wasn’t just a victim, but a victim who actively participated in her own victimization. That she was rushing headlong into a web spun by people more sophisticated, more worldly, more wicked, than she didn’t occur to her until it was too late. She was ensnared.
To Jack, she wrote:
Did I ever tell you about the Turkish millionaires—two of them, brothers, who come into town separately and take me out. One is shy and conservative and does things like go to Mexico City for the soccer world series and takes me to conservative black people’s houses who talk about Billie Holiday. The other one sends cards from Helen Keller’s birthplace and roses and perfume and limos and takes me to the most sordid whiskey A Go Go type places and once asked me politely if I’d like to be beaten.
Eve was making no explicit acknowledgment of pain here. Yet you can sense that something delicate in her had been hurt or damaged, maybe irrevocably.
“It started to go bad with Ahmet when Eve made her collage of him in, I think, late 1969 or early 1970,” said Mirandi. “The collage showed Ahmet, smiling, holding a glass of champagne, a little coke straw. And Eve put herself in there, too—her naked backside. It wasn’t actually her backside. She found some woman in a Renaissance painting with a body exactly like hers, and that’s what she used. Eve saw Ahmet so magically, and she wanted to clarify him for the world. And that’s what she felt she was doing with the collage. She was saying, ‘You’re so fabulous, and I’m so fabulous, and we’re so fabulous.’ She framed it beautifully and she brought it to him at his L.A. office because that’s where she thought it should be hung. He took one look and had a fit. He said, ‘No one must ever see this.’ Eve was just so confused and devastated. It’s not that she thought he was going to leave Mica [his wife] for her, but she thought he should recognize her publicly somehow, you know, as his mistress. And, in that moment, she felt the stone-cold reality of their situation. He would only ever recognize Mica, only ever protect Mica. In fact, he was protecting Mica from her. He was keeping the collage out of his office so Mica wouldn’t have to know he was cheating on her with Eve. Ahmet ultimately forgave Eve, and Eve didn’t stop seeing Ahmet when he came to L.A. Her illusions, though, were in absolute pieces. I mean, she was getting it from all sides at once—first Ahmet, then Earl.”
And there was a shift—perceptible—in Eve’s psychology. Pre–the Ertegun collage, she courted corruption so giddily, participated in her degradation so eagerly, rolled along the path of sin so merrily, that she was incorruptible, undegradable, and beyond reproach—a lewd angel. That all changed post–the Ertegun collage.
In her novel Sex and Rage—autobiographical because, again, that’s the only kind of novel she wrote—the narrator explains how it is between the Eve character, called Jacaranda; the Ertegun character, called Etienne; and the McGrath character, called Max:
The parties would last till 2 or 3 a.m. The girls would tempt Etienne and he’d choose one, perhaps a pretty little laughing blonde he had besieged with dozens of roses, color TVs, and even diamond stud earrings—anything her little heart desired… At about midnight, suddenly, the whole thing would become too boring and Etienne would start spewing insults at the little blonde. Or, worse yet, forget her and start on some new woman… Since Jacaranda cared so little about what Etienne was doing, she usually wound up being the one with whom Etienne slept. By two or three o’clock, Jacaranda would be the only unpassed-out woman extant, and she, Max, and Etienne would have a nightcap and discuss the evening, until one of them was sent home in a Rolls-Royce limousine—Max.
Eve sounded, for the first time, bored—infected by Ertegun’s boredom, contaminated by it. Sounded, too, hard, cold, contemptuous of self and others. Sounded fallen.
The fountain of youth, sex, high spirits, had, at last, run dry.
I. In Hollywood’s Eve, I put Jackson Browne on this very short list of rock ’n’ rollers Eve had photographed but not seduced. I’d asked her straight out if she’d gotten together with Browne. There was a long pause. “I don’t think so,” she finally said, though with a question mark at the end of the sentence rather than a period. Turns out, she was right to be uncertain. From her journal, entry dated October 2, 1969: “Jackson Brown [sic] drove me home and we talked, fucked and had an enormous fight in that order.”
II. I confirmed with Doors drummer—and Eve’s first Doors boyfriend—John Densmore that the cover she was describing was for Waiting for the Sun. “We all loved Eve’s collage, but we were already into discussions with a photographer about shooting us up in the Santa Monica Mountains for the cover.” He added, “I think Jim, in his stupor, was coming on to Eve with his octopus comment.”
CHAPTER 6 Double Trouble
Eve left the Troubadour scene in 1971. At twenty-seven, she was aging out. “I was getting too old to be a record album photographer.”
Aging out in part because the scene had aged her. “Eve was tough enough to hang at the Troubadour bar,” said Mirandi. “There weren’t many women who were. A lot of us—not Eve, but a lot of us—wanted the white picket fence, the kids. And the men were like, ‘No, no, no, no. We’re going to do whatever we want, and we’re going to do it with you, and with her, and with her, and with her.’ So emotionally that was hard. Physically, though, it was also impossible. I did the best I could. But I had to dive out all the time so I could clean up, pull myself together. Eve never dove out.”
Nor was it merely a question of flagging stamina. Eve was bewitched by the scene, and then, suddenly, she wasn’t. “[I’d] begun telling rock ’n’ roll stars I hated rock ’n’ roll and nobody is that cute,” she wrote. A problem because her art depended on her infatuation, as she herself was well aware. “The only way my album covers ever worked was by my being a groupie and blazing with tenderness over what idols my idols were.”
And even if she’d wanted to stick around the Troubadour scene, she couldn’t have. It had left her as surely as she had left it. “The Sixties careened into the Seventies and wandered out the other end,” said Dickie Davis. “The Troubadour bar became the Sad Café. Paris in the Twenties sold to the highest bidder.” The Moveable Feast was moving on.
Both Moveable Feasts.
* * *
Dating the end of the Franklin Avenue scene is a snap: it was over once Joan no longer lived on Franklin Avenue.
Also over once Joan no longer lived on Franklin Avenue: Sixties L.A. “The Sixties did not truly end for me until January of 1971, when I left the house on Franklin Avenue,” she wrote. And yet she recognized that she was out of step with her fellow Angelenos, most of whom would’ve seen her as having a delayed reaction. “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community.”
The murders she’s referring to are, of course, the Manson murders. Model-actress Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant, and four others—Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, and Steven Parent—were beaten, stabbed, and shot by followers of the cult leader at the house Tate shared with husband, director Roman Polanski, 10050 Cielo Drive.
Cielo Drive was a bloodbath and an atrocity and a horror. For those on the Franklin Avenue scene, it was also personal.
Eve knew Tate only glancingly. “The first time I saw Sharon was at the Café de Paris in Rome,” she said. “It was 1961 [Ed. note: 1962, actually], the same year I saw the Pope. I couldn’t believe anyone was that beautiful.”
Mirandi, though, was on decidedly more intimate terms with Tate. “Sharon ordered some clothes from the shop, so Clem and I went to her house for a private fitting.” (In 1968, Mirandi and Clem Floyd, formerly Mirandi’s boyfriend, now Mirandi’s husband, had opened a custom-leather boutique on Sunset.) “The house we went to was the one before the Cielo Drive house. Roman was there, and some kind of weird flirtation was going on between them and us. Clem was necking with Sharon. He would have loved the opportunity to get in her pants, but I was so repulsed by Roman that I couldn’t imagine any of it. I said to Clem, ‘We’re leaving.’ I never wanted to go back.” Mirandi would, however, continue to see Tate. “I’d hang out with Sharon late into the night when Roman wasn’t around. She was so sweet, and—I remember from doing her measurements—a perfect 32-22-32.”
Earl McGrath was the upstairs neighbor of Polanski and Tate when, in the mid-to-late sixties, he kept a two-bedroom apartment—Suite 64—at the Chateau Marmont. On Sundays, he’d throw brunch parties on his terrace with a PEACE/LOVE sign hanging from it. Polanski and Tate were frequent guests.
Sharon Tate on Earl McGrath’s terrace at the Chateau Marmont, Peace and Love, 1968.
As was Anne Marshall. “I saw Sharon at Earl’s, but I already knew Sharon very well. Michelle [Phillips] and I both did. And Wojciech Frykowski had given me and Michelle a pair of wings the year before. We’d used them for our Christmas card. We sent out a picture of ourselves wearing Wojciech’s wings—big, huge angel wings—and the words ‘Season’s Greetings’ on the back. Did Eve help us with that picture? I think maybe, but I can’t remember.”I
Julian Wasser took the famous photo of Polanski’s gruesome homecoming. (Polanski, in a white T-shirt, kneeling by the front door of the Cielo Drive house, the word “PIG” scrawled across it in Tate’s blood.) “The cops didn’t know shit, as usual,” said Wasser. “Roman was in Europe when it happened. He flew back to L.A. with Warren Beatty and a few other people. Roman took me and Tommy Thompson [journalist] and a psychic [Peter Hurkos] to the house. It was his first time on the scene. The carpet had a three-foot circle of jellied blood. Roman was crying. He wanted me to take pictures to give to the psychic so he could find out who did it.”
Griffin Dunne was at the scene of the crime almost as the crime was being committed. In the early-morning hours of August 10, he snuck out of his mother’s house to joyride with his friend Charlie. “I don’t remember how old Charlie and I were—fourteen, maybe—but I do remember that we were so short we had to sit on phone books to see over the dashboard. We were in my mom’s car, a Mercury Cougar. And we were driving these side streets just off Benedict Canyon, which is where Sharon and Roman’s house was. And suddenly there were cop cars everywhere. I mean, everywhere. We thought they were after us.”
And Michelle Phillips was considered briefly—erroneously—a motive. She and Polanski had had an affair earlier that year, and Polanski became convinced that her ex-husband, John Phillips, butchered his wife in revenge. At one point, he threatened John with a meat cleaver. “It was so sad and so revolting and it had happened to our friends,” said Phillips. “Roman and Sharon were close with all of us. This wonderful life that we all had, that we all were sharing, and everyone making tons of money and having a blast together, and going to the Troubadour, and going to all these wonderful parties, to Earl’s, and meeting all these wonderful people—it stopped. There were no parties after that because there was no reason for a party. For me, that was the end of the party.”
What’s more, Manson and his gang weren’t outsiders in Hollywood. The “community” that Joan wrote about? They were part of it. “Their guru, Charlie Manson, was a sociopath,” said Mirandi. “But he was also a singer-songwriter. A lot of the scenes he was on, we were on. He’d lived at the house of Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, and Dennis had recorded one of his songs [Ed. note: ‘Never Learn Not to Love,’ on the Beach Boys’ 1969 album 20/20, is a version of ‘Cease to Exist,’ which Manson wrote for Dennis Wilson but on which Manson received no credit]. Well, I’d gone to high school with Dennis. Dennis was my friend. And it was Dennis who introduced Manson to Eve’s friend Terry Melcher, the record producer. Manson blamed Terry when he didn’t land a contract. Terry had lived at Cielo Drive before Roman and Sharon and he’s the one they meant to kill. And one of Manson’s followers, the musician Bobby Beausoleil, had stayed with Evie for a week, though I don’t think she slept with him.II What I’m trying to say is that the Manson people were our kind of people. They were the people we thought would make the world a better place and here they were dripping in innocent blood.”
I’d contend that the Manson murders weren’t a contradiction of Sixties L.A. so much as an amplification of and elaboration on certain undertones and implications in Sixties L.A.—the shadows creeping into the sunshine. I’d also contend that the Manson murders didn’t end Sixties L.A. so much as start the next phase of Sixties L.A., i.e., Seventies L.A. (The Seventies in L.A. weren’t, in my opinion, a decade unto themselves but an extension of the previous decade: the Sixties the flower child, the Seventies the juvenile delinquent that the flower child—a bad seed all along—grew into.)
“I was too stupid to know I was in the wrong place,” said Eve. “Joan knew, but I didn’t. She had to go through the horrible awakening of finding out that California was in dire straits. I never had to find out because I was too drunk and stoned.”
* * *
If Eve missed the chimes at midnight, she caught the echo.
On July 3, 1971, Jim Morrison, age twenty-seven, died, an event she connected with Charles Manson. “Jim looked like [Manson] in his obit picture in the Los Angeles Times,” she wrote. As though Morrison and Manson, who looked like Morrison in his picture on the cover of Rolling Stone the year prior, were two faces of the same phenomenon: the rock star who dreamed of becoming a homicidal maniac; the homicidal maniac who dreamed of becoming a rock star. (Listen to “People Are Strange” and “The End,” both from 1967. Morrison was telling us what Manson had done two years before Manson did it.)
For Eve, the Troubadour was the quintessence of rock ’n’ roll and Morrison was the quintessence of the Troubadour, even if he never stepped foot on the Troubadour stage. “Jim was a regular at the Troubadour bar,” said Mirandi. “And he actually did what I thought couldn’t be done. He got thrown out for being too drunk and for falling down on too many girls.”
Where Morrison’s concerned, Eve’s feelings aren’t easy to sort out. She wrote about him for Esquire in 1991, when Oliver Stone made the Morrison biopic The Doors. Her attitude toward him in that piece wasn’t cruel, not exactly. After all, she was electrified by Morrison the heartthrob, an object of desire so supreme he was also an object of art. “Michelangelo’s David, only with blue eyes,” she wrote-swooned.
But Morrison the artist provoked another reaction entirely. She spoke of his film-school background with a mixture of contempt and affection: “Being a film major in the sixties was hopelessly square [because] all the movies did was get everything all wrong.” Contempt mounting, affection dwindling, she turned her eye to his band: “The Doors were embarrassing, like their name. I dragged Jim into bed before they’d decided on the name and tried to dissuade him; it was so corny naming yourself after something Aldous Huxley wrote.” She then called Morrison a poet, only she didn’t mean it nice: “If Jim had lived in another era, he would have had a schoolteacher wife to support him while he sat at home writing ‘brilliant’ poetry.” (The quotes around brilliant is an especially brutal touch.)
