Hollywood

"I Got A Call-Back for Quincy, but I'm still looking for work," she says. I here it. I'm at this sleek party in a sleek Trousdale Estates home, with sleek people around who are here because they know somebody or are somebody. I've been here maybe an hour. I'm listening to the beat of the action. I'm impressed, but the Quincy call-back is out of my league. I could chat her up and give her my card, but she's into the sexual elite of Hollywood, a closed circle of amazingly small dimensions. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which counts in its membership most of the power and the glory of Hollywood, numbers around 4000. I'm not one of the dues-paying chosen.

The guy this vision at the party is talking with has produced pictures. He and I both know she's checked him out and hasn't had to look at his $25,000 Piaget watch or ride in his Rolls-Royce to be impressed. Roughly translated, she's said that she's willing to ball him for a part. He is assured and smooth. He takes her arm and guides her to the powder room for some head.

"I may have something coming up for you...," he says. I bet. I am flabber-gasted at the ease of motion and economy of words.

Fifteen minutes later, the producer is refreshed. He is standing in the crowd with another hopeful of impressive proportions. Her chest is too good. He senses Silly Putty tits and moves her out of the way to make room for another lady whom he feels (continued on page 332)Sex In Hollywood(continued from page 181) he can help. It is incredibly tacky action, most reflective of the incredible ego and drive of the producer and the standard operating procedures of the aspirants. The first lady has reapplied her lipstick and is looking for insurance in the form of a different heavy.

The producer must be in his 60s. Maybe the parties are aging him. Either way, it gives me hope for the future.

•

There are in Los Angeles six major studios, about 25 bankable stars whose presence ensures a deal being struck, a picture made, 20,000 dues-paying members of the Screen Actors Guild (only 13 percent of whom earn enough money acting to pay their freight), 3000 members of the Directors Guild, 2500 members of the Writers Guild of America, West, 22,000 members of I.A.T.S.E., the union that controls the technicians.

In a metropolitan area of 9,000,000 people, that whole number makes for one small town. But the lure of Hollywood is so great, the rewards so extraordinary that you are constantly running into people who boast in all seriousness that they were balling a certain hairdresser who recently worked on the very head of this or that very recognizable star.

It is popular to portray this peripheral action as pathetic--all those failed dreams working their way through the parking lots and check-out counters of L.A. But that (essentially snobbish, essentially Eastern) view fails to recognize what all the people who know someone who knows someone who's that close to the head writer on Mork & Mindy know for sure: Today's down-and-out is tomorrow's cash buyer of a Mercedes.

In New York, the very successful publisher of a new magazine is having drinks with some friends at The Four Seasons. Everyone in the place knows the guy, they're all glad-handing him, but all he really wants to talk about is a friend of his who flogged a script through eight years in Hollywood, and $700,000 worth of high-living debt (the last two years spent dodging the people owed the $(700,000). And then, whammo! The script was sold and made and the friend owns a major portion of it, and it's doing great business, and he's paid off the $700,000. The magazine mogul can look forward to a nice train ride to his house in the country, but his pal is making real money, and enjoying a world in which all the little aspiring talents are there for him. So woe to anyone who counted him out those last eight years! It could happen to you! To anyone!

The entertainment business, the "industry," pervades the L.A. atmosphere, transcends the sleaziness, shines through the smog and cracks the real world across the bridge of the nose with dreams. The industry--movies, television, records and publishing--exists as a result of our gluttony for diversion. Big dollars go to people, whether talents of in production. Here there is power and money in massive doses. They are powerful aphrodisiacs for the Hollywood women.

There are men hitting on the women, intent shining out through megabuck eyes. These women smell wealth, suck in power. They are searching for the Hollywood thing, beautiful women drawn to the light, living in the dark.

•

A belly-dancer friend of mine from Albuquerque had a thing for one of the fighter pilots on Battlestar Galactica. Or was it one of the crewmen on Star Trek? It doesn't matter. She left her sexpot python at home and stayed here with me while she tracked him down. It took her two days and a ticket to a celebrity basketball game before his cowboy boots were by her bed. He looked like a hundred other guys, bleary from the night race that everybody wins. And he was gone quick.

In Hollywood, a name is enough. These chicks are proud of conquests, large and small. They study the credits. Outside the Roxy--L.A.'s showcase music club--I hear a girl tell another girl, "I used to have a boyfriend who used to work for Shelter Records," in a tone that easily could have conveyed news of the Second Coming. You have to repeat her words in that tone to pick up in your mind that which she felt was a brush with greatness.

That thrill of propinquity to the industry is hard to fathom. I knew an L.A. expatriate in Hawaii who had baseball-hard silicone breast implants. She once told me, "My mother lost her virginity under the H in the Hollywood sign." That sign sits on a hillside the climbing of which would give Sir Edmund Hillary pause. But it was there, and years after the event, the location of that first copulation was sufficiently memorable to warrant a place in family lore. The birds, the bees and the B movies.

It is not really possible to get a perspective on the powers of seduction of the Hollywood men in terms of age, personality or physical attributes. Beauty is only skin-deep, but money and power go right to the bone. Methuselah, Cyclops and King Kong will score here with equal regularity given money and power, the heating elements that are most endearing to Hollywood.

Money and power are sought after with perhaps the only honest sexual energy (text continued on page 336, following "Sex in Hollywood Meets the Playboy Interview" on page 334) expended here. Everyone knows the game and no one cares much that it is one. Because we see it every day.

We see it at The Beverly Hills Hotel, an elegant halfway house for the hitters. It has a bar called the Polo Lounge, where, depending on the tide, the gamut of Hollywood females may be found, talked up and either made or passed by the producers, the money men, the would-bes and the once-weres. The women are there, from aspiring starlets to $250 hookers. The boundary lines tend to be elusive in the ranks of the mercenaries of both sexes.

Just behind the Polo Lounge, on the grounds of The Beverly Hills Hotel, there is a group of small houses, generally referred to as the bungalows. I was a few days into the scene and in the company of six-foot-something of Finnish model-starlet named Ulla. We were at the hotel for Sunday brunch. We were asked to join a party in one of the bungalows. Probably, the fellow who invited us had overheard my lively conversation and attractive wit and had directed the invitation to my ladyfriend only because he didn't want to come off a sycophant, since I am a new boy.

We wandered back to one of the large bungalows. An Arab oil magnate had inhabited it for two months at that time, with his mostly female, all-American entourage, at a cost of $689 a day. He was taking a Middle East version of a Hollywood siesta. With harem, cocaine and Quaaludes.

Maybe eight or ten fluffies are sitting around. Fluffy is my word for a beautiful young girl with few skills and high ambitions who is generally unemployed; who doesn't look old enough to know where to lick you in places you never thought of; who does cocaine and Quããludes with abandon; who is, generically, a higher order of camp follower or groupie with the attention span of a mongoose; who will grow up to live with someone in the San Fernando Valley, a wasteland of mediocrity on the border of the greatness that is Hollywood. The fluffies are waiting for someone to sweep them off their feel and into one of the bathrooms to ski. Skiing--a nonathletic sport involving the sudden inhalation of the white powder cocaine through a straw and onto the nasal membranes.

I never can count the fluffies, because they are amorphous, drifting crystalline motes of sexual energy in the party, the club, the bar. A gathering of snowy egrets, stilty-legged watchers. They wait for a score.

In the kitchen, an actor famous for light comedy (some 30 films) and an attempted novel or two, now 50ish, is sketching Ulla. A few deft lines and he captures her face. She is beautiful, though I feel she is so dull she couldn't cut butter with her forehead. Her accouterments are shown off by a blouse that emphasizes the effect of air conditioning on nipples. It seems to make the artistic endeavor worth while. He's hitting hard on her the whole time. She passes and, clutching the folded portrait, sits next to me. The actor-author-artist returns to a couple of fluffies to whom he never speaks.

The only verbal visitor in the bungalow is a street-wise New Yorker who parlayed his numbers money and savvy into the Hollywood-club world. He is rapping low to me about 20 years ago, when he and Eddie Egan had a vendetta in Spanish Harlem. You know Eddie Egan--the real-life Gene Hackman in The French Connection?

"We all took off from this alley, right? Egan was makin' the move for a big bust. Fuckin' 14-year-old kids playin' craps. He chased me and tried to take me out."

He rolls up his sleeve and shows me an arm that has a mean-looking bullet scar on it. I am impressed.

"I was after that fucker for three years, man, garbage cans, M-16, the works. And Egan knew it."

I believed him.

Meanwhile, the actor-author-artist, charm and name providing an inexorable attraction, taps his two fluffies. He gives Ulla a last look and walks. The fluffies follow. I've been in the presence of greatness. Those particular fluffies were about a five each, but two fives are a ten and who am I to put down book ends?

•

I am at a recording studio in Hollywood. The name is on one half of the records you own. It has the finest equipment for recording available, including a 32-track digital editing console. The music thumps through a booth like a 747 cockpit, where I sit with an engineer, producer, inevitable lawyer, roadies and the usual amorphous coven of fluffies. There are lots of noses going and there's so much coke in the air my skin is going numb. The cooling system is set so you could hang meat in the place. The session goes until four in the morning.

After four, it's the Jacuzzi, a piece of equipment that jets the ladies to kingdom come and is a close second in popularity to drugs in the Hollywood sex race. There are a lot of people in there--coked out, smoked out and getting sexed out. Groping in the hot water in search of aprés-rock truth. Pinching rosy nipples at the surface and exploring below. Fucking in ignorance of Archimedean hydraulic theory and in defiance of 105-degree temperatures. Then quickly to the handy water bed in relays, rising to the equation frenetically in odd numbers. Love. Ain't it grand?

The studio has other oddments for the convenience of musicians, crew, businessmen, friends and fluffies, not the least of which is a supply of single-edged razor blades in boxes like matches. I never saw any shaving cream. I never saw anyone there who didn't look like he was responding to a full moon. But the blades are handy for chipping and lining the white crystal called coke on a mirror. Silver spoons and golden straws. Sniff, snort, pass the glass. Wake up and rock. Ears for the music, eyes on the lines, man; everyone waiting for the plate. Praise the Lord and pass the coke. Hit it, hurt it.

•

The men on the inside, the producers, the actors, the rock stars, they've earned the life. They can pay for coke. They can pay for everything. They have worked for "it." Now they have it in a way that Werner Erhard never gave anyone--money, power, instant recognition. Credibility is not an issue when you're driving a Rolls. You've got it. Or appear to have it, which is just as good. And you are "in."

Coke is a Rolls. Quaaludes are a back seat. Coke is available at $300 a gram and illegal as hell. Everyone who's in has some. It is stepped on a lot along the way--cut with everything from baby laxative to speed and angel dust. The quality varies and a lot of people with it go through 20 or 30 grams a month. Plus what they give their friends and marks. So what if the good guys of music and the silver screen suck enough white crystal into their noses to support the average middle-class American household? So what if they drop those little white pills on fluffies? So what? That's entertainment.

Women here are a commodity. Especially the young ones. They are everywhere, and whether they sell it or use it or give it away, they are treated the same. The appeal is to the eye. Sexuality is everywhere. Tits and ass and jiggle are gross industry references in a town in which there is physical beauty in every possible configuration. Those references start to say something about the attitude here toward women. The reaction to that attitude is a perceptible defensiveness in women that borders on paranoia. Sincerity, in all sexes, is present in the same general quality as it is perceived in the movies, with a depth approximately equal to that of the picture reflected from the silver screen. Feelings appear gutter-puddle shallow; everyone knows that, no one seems to care.

The Hollywood women are expensive, too, whether you own, lease or rent. Lee Marvin knows that. Flip Wilson, Peter Frampton, Rod Stewart all know that, because those ladies who gave want to get. This is a town of users. People are talking about legal-release forms to put on their doors. They'll need them by the gross. I might have a friend staying with me for a few days and during that time I write another Rocky and wham, the mercenary disease hits and my ladyfriend is roaring down the fast lane with a big piece of my change, less only the one third contingency fee her lawyer got for the suit. Those kinds of bucks buy lots of miles out here, rolling.

The Hollywood types run to the private clubs--Pips and the Daisy at the top of the list; sometimes, part open, part private Carlos 'N Charlie's; rarely Julie's Place. The call of the wild is all around. Friday night, jungle dance. Find it, feel it, do it to it. Walk out with dinner, meat on the hoof; Saturday night, date night, maybe someone from Friday, probably a date arranged before, because who knows if you'll score for sure on Friday? Sunday through Wednesday is for cruisin' and R and R, get the nose in shape; Thursday night, warm up.

But always cruisin'. The jungle of bodies. Primal people. Smell it--the spoor, the stalk, no prisoners, but trophies, man, trophies. Alley Oop in a Maserati, 'Ludes a velvet hammer to the head. The Flintstones doing lines. It's a hunt; that instinct is right up front. They're meat eaters, flesh rippers; all of them are one with the libido. They're all game, too, and they're all stalking one another with the finest hunting equipment in terms of drugs, camouflage suits and transportation that money can buy.

•

The locker-room smell of amyl nitrite pervades the Studio One disco. And, man, they dance. Black and white, the disco beat thumps and they jump. Jeans, fake climbing boots, high-heeled sneakers. Not much leather. A beautiful club. They're all men out there. Few femmes, they're gay men. There's a constant flow to the bathroom and the scene is not in quality different from the hetero moves here--all quick, sure and to the point.

Krafft-Ebing would have had a field day in this milieu. There's always been the casting couch. Now picture it draped in various B/D,S/M or fetish regalia and there, the casting director, agent or producer is balling the bejesus out of an aspiring actor who looks like Tarzan, smells like Jane and talks like Boy. I don't know whether or not he shaves his toes. Maybe. The industry is hitting on the guys, amigo. Just like on the chicks, and with hearts pounding as amys, the gay drug, are inhaled and two male hearts beat as one at 180 to the minute. Working it out in the dream factory.

A nice balance to the gay caballeros are the gay señoritas. Also a large minority. Then there are the bi ladies and the bi men and those who live with either homophiles or persons of like proclivities, but only in transit to a final sexual resting ground. Where? Who knows? The sexual permutations on the scene, even forgetting group endeavors, are not susceptible of rational calculation. And I guess it's not important, as long as you are getting yours, often and easy, right?

Between the presently straight and the presently gay Hollywoodites there is a broad spectrum of fast-moving 'tweens of unclassifiable categories with respect to race, creed and sex of origin. Silicone and sex changes are making a lot of doctors here richer. The products of our space-age technology are out on the Sunset Strip or Hollywood Boulevard and industry cars pick them up along with the girls and boys who do what they do and always have done on the seamier side of the fast lane.

•

Hollywood people play at home, sometimes. They have every bit as much need for boredom eliminators as the consuming audiences. But their environment is different and their entertainment, therefore, more exotic. You can read about it in any number of scandal sheets. The readership is not content with knowing who is sleeping with whom, because it is a given that industry people are screwing everyone. They want to know what it was like. A budding porn princess confesses to spending the evening with two of Hollywood's most eligible bachelors and another porn princess in a mansion located off Sunset. "It went on for hours. The girls did each other. The guys didn't. There were vibrators and video tapes. Everyone had about 20 orgasms. I fell asleep when the host showed King Kong on the Betamax."

Across the country, adult shops purvey what are euphemistically called marital aids. Hollywood has The Pleasure Chest, a supermarket of devices for people of all proclivities, including the $225 variable-speed patented Accu-Jac for guess what?, dildos and other novelties in dimensions that range from sizes I consider credible to jumbo double-ended electric phalli and elephantine Arnold Schwarzenegger arm latex novelties that I suggest you drive to your love nest in something with more trunk space than a Honda Civic. There is sufficient leather gear to outfit the Hell's Angels and a large enough assortment of rubber suits, chains, whips, cuffs and clamps to provide them with many happy hours of diversion. The point is that a lot of Hollywood people buy those things. A salesman told me that, despite the high quality of the gear, there is a constant call for replacement. Chauffeurs make a lot of pickups. The store is considering home deliveries.

The premise here is that sex is supposed to be fun, no one's supposed to get hurt, nothing should be taken past the limit of good times and good health. Every deviance is permissible as long as it: doesn't offend this loosely understood code, and when it does, the ghost of Fatty Arbuckle comes back to haunt the transgressor. The latest, most celebrated expression of this restraint was the case of Roman Polanski, who two years back was accused of seducing a 13-year-old girl with promises of celebrity, with Quaaludes and champagne. Although Polanski was a sympathetic figure with powerful friends decidedly on the scene, he became an instant pariah and was visibly anguished to see himself deserted in his hour of need. What he didn't understand about the loose standards here is that for all the fault-line morality of the place, everyone believed that the only person who should be fucking a 13-year-old girl is a 14-year-old boy--and Polanski was just about 30 years too old for the action. He sulked and pouted and was heard to say that in Europe, no one would pay attention to such a thing; but in L.A., loose as it is, attention is paid. There are, even here, a few rigid rules of conduct:

Thou shalt not be drunk at lunch.

Thou shalt not impede the flow of traffic.

Thou shalt not involve the kids.

Thou shalt not try too hard.

But the fact that the line was drawn at Polanski didn't really derive from the facts of the case. There was no strong feeling that the girl had been injured. In our tribe, 13 can fool you. She spilled the story bragging, not complaining. Beyond which, Polanski is a childlike creature, even at 44--Shorty Arbuckle, as it were. One could not accuse him of failing to pick on someone his own size. No, the revulsion derived not from the evident sadomasochism of his movies but from his strangely lurid celebrity as the martyr left by Charlie Manson.

The Charlie Manson case tamed behavior in Los Angeles. For months after-ward, reports circulated of video tapes involving the sexual extravaganzas engaged in by stars, the police were holding them, three stars all in the top ten bartered them out of police hands by putting up money for the reward. There is a certain stratum of rich and deranged society that tends to leave behind video tapes and pictures. Tinseltown has a long history of stars who died flagrante delicto--the Hollywood Babylon tradition, doomed explorers who never gave up searching for that nirvana where the path of money, drugs and sex takes you to the palace of peace and wisdom. Understandably, this is a heroic tradition that tempts those whose money and morals are equally loose, and no matter what you want, no matter how dangerous, funky, sick, depraved, disgusting, you can have it right now! It's all here in Hollywood.

But so is it everywhere, if you're determined. Here it is perhaps cheaper and better packaged, since, generally speaking, there's not much need for subterfuge. Baby parties. Teenage fist fuckers. Genital tattooing. Human sacrifices. If you're too weird for Hollywood, you deserve some kind of medal.

The Polanski scandal sent a shudder just a shade too delicious through even the blackest hearts, and before he fled the country for France, he was as much tormented by the dropping away of his friends as he was by the fear of prison. He simply couldn't understand why these coke-snorting, snake-fucking friends of his would take such righteous umbrage at the kind of amusing afternoon that would have gone unnoticed in France.

Had he forgotten the first lesson of Hollywood? That you're only up as long as no one thinks you're down? You make a flop or two and you can live through it as long as you believe, truly believe, that everything is all right. But if you have the tiniest murmur of doubt, or if you worry for an instant that the reason the phone isn't ringing is because you've been deserted, then the pack can smell it. It's the faint but acrid odor of flop sweat. Polanski had crossed that line, he had screwed the pooch, he had gotten to the point where he was just bad news.

"He was taking a Middle East version of a Hollywood siesta. With harem, cocaine and Quaaludes."