The future always looks good in the golden land,
because no one remembers the past…
He sent for his heart of the moment, a tempestuous Mexican girl who had
lately abandoned a Tijuana honky-tonk for a career on the screen. “Seen
a lady in here, buddy? Tall, pretty, brown hair, in a print bolero jacket
over a blue crepe silk dress. Wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat with a
velvet band?” Next to the agent was the girl whose face had seemed
sad as she danced by in the rumba. “Oh, Jim,” said the agent,
“Pamela Knighton – your future star.” She turned to him with professional
eagerness. What the agent’s voice had saidto her was: “Look alive!
This is somebody.” “Pamela’sjoined my stable,” said the agent.
“I want her to change her name to Boots.” “I thought you said Toots,”
the girl laughed. “Toots or Boots. It’s the oo-oo sound. Cutie shoots
Toots. Judge Hoots. No conviction possible. Pamela is English. Her real
name is Sybil Higgins.” She looked at me with dark tired eyes. Her fingers
twisted a thin glass that smelled of peppermint. He had been in
Hollywood less than three months and still found it a very exciting place,
but he was lazy and didn't like to walk. There was a desert wind blowing
That night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through
the mountains passes and curl your hair and makes your nerves jump and
your skin itch. At Ten Tonight In the Hollywood Bowl Sonja Heine Will
Skate On Hot Soup. She was supposed to look drunk and she did, but not
with alcohol. “Los Angeles, give me some of you!” There were always
plenty of indigenes, and they were instantly recognizable, not so much
by their looks but as Theresa Duncan says of their perfumed smell,
"celluloid and sand, coyote fur and car exhaust, contrail cloud and
chlorine, bitter orange and stage blood and one bushel of ghostly, shivery
night-blooming jasmine flowers like blown kisses from the phantoms of
the ten thousand screen beauties who still haunt our hills every full
moon because they think it's a stage light. “Hollywood’s a good place,”
he said, as if to forestall any criticism from her, “You’ll like it. Most English
girls do – they don’t expect too much. I’ve had luck working with English girls.”
“Go on,” he said. “Say it.” It was a picture of Faye Greener, a still from a
tworeel farce in which she had worked as an extra. She had given him the
photograph willingly enough, had even autographed it in a large, wild hand,
"Affectionately yours, Faye Greener," but she refused his friendship, or, rather,
insisted on keeping it impersonal. It is the trail of an intention gone haywire,
the flotsam of the New California. She shook her head slowly. There is some
confusion in Lucille Miller’s mind about what happened. He was, she said,
“just black”: the revelation that the dream was teaching the dreamers how
to live. He looked rich; and then a woman got out, and she was beautiful,
her fur was silver fox, and she was a song across the sidewalk and inside
the swinging doors, and I thought oh boy for a little that, just a day and
a night of that, and she was a dream as I walked along, her perfume still
in the wet morning air. Here is the last stop for all those who come from
somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past
and the old ways. “Miss April Lalear of the cinema, if you please,” The
elevator started down in the shaft again. Panic flicked in her blue eyes
like a ripple on water. “No,” she said breathlessly, “but take me out of
this hall.” She went in past me like a wave. Sandalwood floated on the air,
very faint. “So you’re a chess-player,” Mrs. Stan Phillips said, in that
guarded tone, as if she had come to look at my etchings. I wished she had.
When I went in with the drinks she had a gun in her hand. It was a small
automatic with a pearl grip. “Maybe this hot wind has got you crazy too”,
the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the
Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana
wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines
through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves. “That perfume,”
I said, “would drive a deacon nuts…no pearls.” Somewhere high in the desert
near a curtain of blue / St. Anne's skirts are billowing / But down here in the
city of limelights /The fans of Santa Ana are withering. Her lips curled.
“I supposed you would want money.” She shook her head slowly and her hand
stayed near her bag and her blue eyes had glitters in them. For it is past its
prime already. It has lost the exuberant certainty that made it seem, even
when I first knew it, unarguably the City of the Future, the City That Knew How.
None of us Know now. “You were right,” she said tonelessly. “They are not my
pearls.” She had told him why. He had nothing to offer her, neither money nor
looks, and she could only love a handsome man and would only let a wealthy
man love her. A lot of California murderesses live here, a lot of girls who somehow
misunderstood the promise. “Can’t you understand that you don’t get into the
pictures just by changing your name? And that you don’t even stay there when
you get in? that you can’t even stay there by being female? That they come
here in droves on every train – girls younger and prettier than Samantha and
who will do anything to get into the pictures?” The lemon groves are sunken,
down a three-or four-foot retaining wall, so that one looks directly into their
dense foliage, too lush, unsettlingly glossy, the greenery of nightmare. The
machine has lost its promise of emancipation, and if L.A. then seemed a talisman
of fulfillment, now it is tinged with disillusion. I went out of the bar without
looking back at her, got into my car and drove west on Sunset and down all
the way to the Coast Highway. He rode with his eyes closed against the sun.
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