I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (3 page)

She asked Michael and me if we wanted to be her dates to the
Pulp Fiction
party over at Chasen’s, since a certain segment of the crowd had already begun to make a mass exodus over there from Morton’s. She grabbed my wrist and looked at my watch herself. “Pat is commandeering the limo and I’m supposed to meet her out front in just a couple of minutes now. Come on, boys. Be my dates.”

Michael and I shrugged and followed her out to the limo. We climbed in the back with her. Michael took a jump seat. I sat next to Jessica and put her Oscar between my legs. Pat Kingsley sat on the other side of her and looked over at me with an expression of confusion and disgust. How had she been so lax as to allow someone like me in the limo with her client? The limo swerved abruptly for some reason—it was hard to know why through all the tinted glass—and we all fell silent for the ride over to Chasen’s, as if in a show of respect for its impending demise. The
Pulp Fiction
party we were headed toward was more than Chasen’s last hurrah. It was its wake. The restaurant, by closing its doors forever in just a few days, was proving that a certain sort of Hollywood was not just dying out but finally dead.

Only the year before at
Vanity Fair
’s first Oscar party Dominick Dunne had used Chasen’s as a kind of parable to illustrate our place in its world. I had been standing at that same spot at the bar at Morton’s feeling the same odd despondency and smiling wanly or glancing anxiously at anyone who’d smile or glance back when Nick, as he was known to his friends, noticed me hanging out all alone. He came over and gave me a nudge. “What’s wrong, kid?” he had asked.

I shrugged and shook my head at it all. I tried to pretend I wasn’t feeling what I was feeling. But the pretense was too much—not the party’s but my own. “I was just thinking of something John Keats once wrote in a letter,” I told Nick, sounding even more pretentious than I was feeling. Yet Keats has always been a comfort to me. “‘Who would wish to be among the commonplace crowd of the little famous,’ he wrote, ‘who are each individually lost in a throng made up of themselves?’ This is kind of a commonplace crowd of the overly famous, but it still holds true, huh. They are each individually lost in a throng of themselves. I know I’m lost in it. I feel like I’m just visiting my own life.”

Nick put his arm around me. “Fuck John Keats,” he said. “You know Chasen’s?” he asked me. “It was the Morton’s of its day. Not sure how long it can hang on. So glamorous yet so homey when Hollywood itself was both those things. There’s a great waiter who’s still working over at Chasen’s. He’s hanging in there. His name is Tommy. Tommy Gallagher. He’s a real character. Doesn’t take guff from anybody. Much wiser than John Keats. Some of the stars used to come in just so Tommy could take their measure. See Nancy Reagan over there,” Nick said, nodding toward the former First Lady who had attended the party that year. “She and I were talking earlier about Chasen’s. She and President Reagan loved to dine there. They go way back with the place. She told me that when she was in the hospital having both her children Tommy sent over food from Chasen’s so she wouldn’t have to eat that hospital grub. She also told me that ‘Ronnie’ had even proposed to her there in his favorite booth and that Tommy had overheard their plans to be married at the Little Brown Church in the Valley with Bill Holden as their best man. Nobody else was invited but Bill and his wife—I forget her name. Nancy told me that Tommy never breathed a word to anyone. Never told a soul. Never tipped off the press. And the day of the wedding he came and stood across the street from the church in order to pay his respects. That’s who we are—you and I, Kevin—we’re Tommy the waiter from Chasen’s standing silently across the street all alone. You just have to find a way to feel lucky about that. I’ve got to get back to Nancy now. She’s looking over here. Sometimes we get to cross the street.”

He touched my arm.

“Happiness is a choice, kid,” he said. “Choose to be happy.”

*   *   *

If happiness is a choice, is sadness one also? I only know on my way to Chasen’s that night in the back of that limo I could have pretended it was the greatest birthday I’d ever had—filled with famous guests, a date who had just won the Oscar for Best Actress—but I realized it was far from it. I don’t mean for that to be interpreted in any way against Jessica Lange. She only showed me kindness that night, generosity. But I didn’t really know her, nor she me, and yet there we were—the night of her Oscar win, the wee hours of my birthday—in the back of a limo together. The moment itself wasn’t exactly the saddest moment of my life—there’s been too much competition for that—but it was the exact moment that I became aware of how sad I really was, so sad I could not breathe and cracked a window to get some air. I tried to find the absurdity in the situation later and, in my diary, labeled Kingsley “The Peeved Publicist” and Fox “the town’s latest iteration of Jimmy Cagney, who sat rather irritably at that point himself on the jump seat.” And yet as I remember it now, the absurdity subsides and all that is left is how rational the sadness was.

“Roll that window up,” Pat ordered me as we pulled into Chasen’s parking lot and the paparazzi pushed toward us. She reached across Jessica and took the Oscar from between my legs and handed it back to her. Then on Pat’s cue—a groan as exaggerated as my grandfather’s as she made sure to be the first to unfold her own body before confronting a room full of people as worshipful as any in a small Methodist church sanctuary back in Mississippi—we all climbed from the car.

Pat put on her best game face and ran interference, confronting the flashing bulbs of the paparazzi with a combination of fearlessness and feigned indifference. Soon after our entrance, she cleared a space in one of the booths. Was it the one where Ronnie had proposed to Nancy? It really didn’t matter. That night it was Lange’s as she settled into it and received those who fell into her line of vision.

I resumed my spot next to her and, sitting there, allowed the night to befall mine as well. Sculpted profiles, perfected, formed taut bas-reliefs of flesh against the room’s dark knotted paneling. Courtney Love, who’d already made her way over there, loomed largest, her loudness, her dishabille beauty, causing a bit of the crowd to puddle like standing water about her. She gave me a withering stare, then winked at me before throwing her head back and laughing with too much abandon.

In another cluster, Quentin Tarantino, his back to me, more than spoke. He was spinning a yarn of some sort, his spray of spittle in evidence there in the deep glow of one of Chasen’s chunky heavily shaded lamps. I watched some of it settle on the head of his own Oscar he’d won for Best Original Screenplay, beading it with little blisters of moisture as if it were beginning to perspire like everybody else in the overcrowded room. Martin Landau, who had won the award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of the movingly creepy Bela Lugosi in
Ed Wood,
kept letting people rub his spittle-less Oscar’s head for luck.

Landau’s own head was topped off with a toupee. With all the congratulatory jostling throughout the evening, it had become a bit untethered and listed to the left as he too now listened to Tarantino, whose sour joy at having only won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar permeated the room until the whole venue took on the surly swank of
Pulp Fiction
itself. Samuel L. Jackson, who was so brilliant in
Pulp Fiction
but had lost the Oscar to Landau, stared sourly, joyfully, at the man’s left-listing toupee. John Travolta’s hairpiece held tight. Sharon Stone shook an old man’s hand. Love got bored with throwing back her head at the horror of herself and came pushing through the party toward Lange’s booth. She knelt and paid homage. Lange was visibly tiring but still had enough in her to give that gimcrack tiara now there in front of her a couple of gentle taps, the last gesture of amusement she would allow herself that evening. I looked away from Love. I thought of the orchids.

*   *   *

I still thought of those past orchids as I sat staring at a present one, tastefully potted, there on my hotel room’s desk, a lone labellum clinging to its own life. I noticed the message light blinking on my phone and wondered if someone had called to wish me a happy fifty-third birthday. I punched in the code and heard instead the voice of Hugh Jackman’s publicist telling me that his photo shoot for the cover of
Parade
was running late out in Malibu so our lunch had to be pushed back by an hour. I shrugged at the message and focused on the job at hand. The extra hour gave me just enough time to shower and peruse my notes concerning Jackman’s juggernaut of a career as well as his disciplined adherence to a twice-a-day meditative practice that such a career conversely engendered in him.

I’d been up late the night before, in fact, reading about his devotion to the School of Practical Philosophy, upon which his meditative practice is based. Having already memorized most of the information, I only gave my notes a perfunctory fifteen minutes. I then folded them and stuffed them into my back pocket before having the hotel doorman hail a cab from the queue of five or six at the ready for East Coasters like me. To be seen in a cab is anathema to a Los Angelian. It’s almost as bad as lowering one’s price or losing to the Celtics. When I’ve pulled up in one out there I’ve seen some people roll their eyes. Others grow quiet. All recoil.

Once I got to the Peninsula hotel, I had to wait still longer after Jackman’s publicist called yet again to tell me that they were stuck in freeway traffic. I read my notes once more, then sat and watched the swirl of tourists in the lobby—a bevy of bejeweled Arab women arguing about something in a language that lifted and fell in a kind of ancient flyting ritual, a couple of towheaded children telling each other secrets, a bride-to-be from Brentwood, I surmised, sweeping in with some garishly dressed girlfriends for the shower they were throwing for her over in the Verandah Room.

Jackman suddenly came bursting through the front doors looking around for someone who had been described to him, no doubt, as bald and short with a tape recorder at the ready. He spotted me and I laughed at his harried state, thankful for it. I had worried I was the one who would be slightly rattled that day. My dark mood that morning had scared me, making me think I really might be as mad as a March hare. Hugh, who hated being late, appeared rather mad and hare-like himself as he hurried toward me. We were, around 3:00
P.M.
, the only ones left in the Peninsula’s Belvedere restaurant.

I relaxed into the resulting privacy and was prepared for another coy give-and-take with a carefully coached celebrity. I was also prepared to ask him any question I felt compelled to ask. What I was not prepared for was the one question he felt compelled to ask me.

*   *   *

“I turned forty last year and it didn’t bother me at all,” Jackman said when I told him it was my birthday. “Life has only gotten better.”

“Yeah, well, forty didn’t bother me either,” I said. “But turning fifty sure did. When I moved to New York back in 1975 there were old coots like me now—well, gentlemen of a certain vintage, the art world’s Henry Geldzahler and the poet Howard Moss—who told me, ‘You should have been here in the 1940s and 1950s, kid, when New York was New York.’ I’m at that age now when I hear myself talking to young guys about how great New York was in the seventies when Times Square, like sex back then, was dirty. But it’s our youth we miss, not any earlier version of the city. What we miss is that earlier version of ourselves when we ourselves could be dirty and innocent at the same time.”

“Have you seen
American Swing
?” Jackman asked. “It’s that documentary about the sex club Plato’s Retreat during the seventies. I really want to see that.”

“I never wanted to see the real place that much when it was around,” I told him. “The one or two times I went there I couldn’t get the smell of it out of my nostrils for a day or so. Somebody gave me my first hit of poppers there.”

“Yeah, I read about something called the Mattress Room they had there,” he said. “Sounded kind of … ah … redolent.”

“I don’t like public sex,” I heard myself confessing to him. “But I’ll do anything behind a locked door. If I don’t like it then I don’t do it again.”

“That’s brilliant,” Jackman said, laughing as if I were joking. “My favorite play I studied in drama school was
The Bacchae
. It’s about King Pentheus, who gets eaten alive by all the women in a kind of orgy,” he said, his eyes widening in anything but a steely stare, and I suddenly had an image of my three blond muses—Lange and Madonna and Love—devouring him in the role of the king. “I love that idea of animalistic chaos and following our desires,” he continued. “I think the Wolverine character I’ve played a couple of times now kind of represents that. He’s a man who battles between the animal and the human in him, between the chaos in him and the self-control he must have. We all deal with this to some extent every day. At what point do we let go and do what we want to do when we should submit to rules? This is a man who is terrified of the blind fury he gives in to. It’s when he’s at his most glorious and at his most devastating—and yet at his most destructive.”

I certainly understood battling the animalistic side of myself, which usually ended, however, in a destructive bacchanal of sex and drugs instead of blind fury. And yet for the first time I realized in that very moment that is exactly the way my blind fury unfurls itself: sex and drugs.

I cleared my throat and asked a prepared question. “Isn’t your adherence to the practice of the School of Practical Philosophy all about acknowledging the duality in our natures and yet finding the unifying element in us all? There is a sentence in Sanskrit…,” I said.

“… Tat Tvam Asi…,” he said.

“Thou art that,” we said together.

*   *   *

Jackman and I finished our meal as well as our interview, touching on all the topics that
Parade
readers wanted to know about—not Greek kings being devoured by three blond muses, but his adopted children, his own parents and childhood in Australia, his love for his wife, his hosting of the Oscar telecast, his stage and movie career. The waiter, surprising me, brought out a piece of mocha-frosted cake with a lone lit candle stuck atop it. Jackman must have told him to do it when he excused himself earlier, saying he had to make a quick phone call. The waiter made an elaborate ritual out of it all and then Jackman serenaded me with “Happy Birthday.”