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Chapter Four

AT THE AGE OF FIVE Lola was brought by her family to California, along with the German silverware, the mahogany tables, the twenty-four dining room chairs, the lace tablecloths, the candelabra, the servants, from the home with a clothes hamper chute where when the cloth used for Kotex in those days was soiled, you just lightly tossed it down the little wall door and one week later it was returned to you nice and clean and neatly folded by some woman who came once a week to launder, a woman nobody ever saw – or at least Lola never even remembered. Until she ran away from home at the age of twenty-six to join a Martha Graham-type traveling modern dance troupe and became radicalized into a Trotskyite, she lived in that house with that furniture and for a long time, though she refused to speak that Berliner German they spoke at home to keep the tone up and the servants in Mars where they belonged in 1911.

It wasn’t as though a lot of German silverware and candelabra weren’t already out in Southern California by the time Hein Vogel, Lola’s westward-destined mother – one of those Jews too elegant to have left before any pogroms squeezed her out like my grandmother’s exit from Kiev – arrived, it was just that most of it was in Pasadena on North Orange Grove Drive. The mansions in Pasadena even today are perfect for trainloads of European treasures brought from the Midwestern fortunes – the Bambols, the Wrigleys – coming to California for “the climate.” Because if you were from the Midwest, and you wanted to breathe air that wasn’t all taken up by the fortunes breathing in the Newport Beach-style mansions, Henry James tablecloths, and already organized society which wasn’t going to let anyone in until endless formalities transpired, then “the climate” of California, the orange groves, the purple mountains’ actual visible majesty – the San Gabriel Mountains there, brightly purple – was a good place for your servants to polish your teapots.

Perhaps Lola’s German Midwestern fortune made from stockings was refused in Pasadena because it was Jewish and that’s why it all had to come to Hollywood and that’s why Lola was raised in the middle of Hollywood during the twenties with Hollywood Boulevard four blocks away; the Hollywood School for Girls, the private school she attended; Jean Harlow sitting next to her in class, Jackie Coogan, the only boy and the school mascot, while at home she was strictly bound to a classic Germany, a Germany of violin practice two hours a day, of culture, of table manners that got Bobby Hall – one of those Panthers of the sixties whom she traveled with when she married Luther, her black second husband – so mad he shot a hole through her dining room ceiling. I mean Lola eating ribs with a knife and fork was just too much for him. But Lola, who was sixty by then, could never have picked something up with her fingers – after all her mother, then ninety-four, was still alive even if it was in Honolulu (that woman really meant West) and even though Lola was now officially into The Movement with a vengeance, she just wasn’t about to not use silverware.

Of course it was nothing to be too much for the Black Panther Party when you’re sixty if you’ve been too much for the Hollywood School for Girls when you were fifteen. She’d go to school there in 1926 dressed in her navy blue middy outfit and wait till school let out to change into a black skirt slit up to her thigh and a lot of blood-red lipstick smashed on the front of her face, so she could go out onto Hollywood Boulevard and try and pick up guys, trying to look older than a schoolgirl yet still unable to quite look old enough by then. Even though the Hollywood School for Girls believed the worst, Lola dropped out before she could graduate so as not to spread sin around the virgins in her class. L.A. It was impossible for her strict German upbringing to stop Lola from being too much. For L.A. women became L.A. women if they got there young enough, no matter what they had been born into.

When Lola was sixteen, her mother gave Lola a Model T Ford, a reward because Lola won the state violin gold medal – though how Lola focused herself into the discipline it takes to practice a violin during the Hollywood School for Girls is simply paradoxical enough for some L.A. woman like her to prove was possible.

The Model T Ford gave her exactly everything. She could drive down Sunset Boulevard, which in 1927 when she began taking the car to the beach wasn’t much of a street at all and still isn’t, though at least today it’s paved.

Lola became a muscle beach aficionado, the top of four layers of musclemen – the girl with her arms raised in graceful triumph, wearing a horrible black wool bathing suit which did purposefully Bermuda shorts-type things to her gorgeous thighs and crowded her 36DD breasts into squashed-out spongecakes. The neckline was modesty itself and it was necklines like these that were probably responsible for people, the minute they could, turning into Jean Harlow by the thirties and letting the devil take the hindmost.

Mountain climbing – in those days, all you had to do in Hollywood was go outside to go mountain climbing – was Lola’s idea of where to take boyfriends and get pregnant and by the time she was nineteen she’d had three gold medals for violin state champion and four abortions, her life having finally, I suppose, proven that you can’t go around being an L.A. woman and expect society not to notice when your bowing begins to sound a little off – not screechy, naturally but, well, she simply wasn’t gold medal material finally, and they gave her a silver one, second prize. My father got the gold one. Even though Lola insists that my father’s tone was then and always has been enough to make you leave the room.

“Mort,” she says to my father, the minute he tries to play anything in front of her for as long as I can remember, “for God’s sake! Not more Bach!”

And he looks around like a cat does when it pretends it wasn’t doing what it just did that you caught it at, and was really licking its foot, or wondering if it were going to rain.

Lola and my father never saw anything in each other. My father would never have liked any woman crazier than my mother. And as for Lola – looking at a particularly outstanding old photograph of her standing beside this six-foot-tall extra who looked like a Hindu (as he was billed in his mystic-prince capacity for those who wanted a “reading”), both Lola and he wearing this rattan shadow falling across what would have otherwise shown them to be as naked as you thought – Mort was simply too square.

From the beginning, from the time she was standing outside that mountain cabin and she was wearing her Cleopatra haircut which she wore all her life, turning it oranger and oranger with henna as time went on until today Colette would have tripped if she saw her, Lola’s preferences weren’t socially bogged down. And a trust fund kept her from letting what she wanted get in the way of wolves at the door, for wolves never threatened her door and she never had to turn to the idea of respectability just to tide herself over for a decade or two until she could figure out how to indulge her flagrant tastes for the out-of-the-question. Or for men who, English mothers have always told their daughters, simply “won’t do.”

Even she, Lola’s mother, didn’t seem to get overburdened by the problem of men who “didn’t do,” once her only husband’s brisk demise allowed her to pack up and leave for L.A.

“Nobody ever knew why Hein was such a rebel,” Lola said. “The family wanted her to take the three of us home to Berlin and be brought up with the better things. Minneapolis, anything in America, was Greek to them. And when she came out West, they sent this friend of the family, this doctor called Frederik, to marry her and take her back.”

A photograph of Lola’s mother, Hein, looking like a battle-ax from the Queen Victoria understanding of the word, dressed in a Red Cross Volunteer Aide’s outfit with some kinds of medals attached to her jacket, which meant she was a general or something gruesome like that, her hair hidden behind a nurse’s nun-type headdress, her overbearing bosom completely making Lola’s and mine both pretty much as hers was, except that we weren’t battle-axes, forcing your eyes to look elsewhere from obviousness.

Beside her stood Frederik, a delicate Berliner Jewish intellectual who found himself spending the rest of his life in the Biltmore Hotel in downtown L.A. (for the first few years) and then, in a house nearer Hein in Hollywood, wooing her as best he could into whatever it was they did.

“They used to give musicales,” Lola told me. “They’d invite the whole Berliner community over on Sundays and she would play the cello and he would play the oboe—”

“The oboe!” I cried.

“That’s right.” Lola shook her head.

(As anyone with a knowledge of orchestra instruments knows, playing the oboe for longer than two years makes you go insane.)

One time the musicale was a special fundraiser – though since Lola was nineteen at the time and it was 1930, what the worthy cause would have been even Lola can’t remember (usually it was Flanders Field-type orphans her mother leaned toward). This particular night Lola had to get all dressed up in a taffeta and net powder-blue formal which came down to her feet and stockings, a garter belt, the works.

“And I was to play Mendelssohn’s violin concerto – my first really Berlin debut,” Lola remembered. “Only even though I could play it fine in public in front of judges – playing in front of all those women, they all looked like her, you know, Hein – and all those men who looked like Frederik, so sensitive and delicate – I just stood there. I couldn’t remember one note. And they just sat there, politely. And I just stood there. God.”

“How long did you stand there?”

“Five minutes,” she sighed.

“Oh, Lola, come on, not five whole minutes. Not five! They wouldn’t let you just stand up there for five whole minutes and not play a note.”

“My friend timed it,” Lola said. “She began looking at the clock at eight-fifteen and watched me run out of there – I left the fiddle on the stage – at eight-twenty. Precisely. And we’ve always been very precise.”

Lola ran down the street to where her current boyfriend lived in a rooming house, rattling his window and insisting that he meet her at the corner. The “corner” was right at Beechwood and Franklin, which, today, is two blocks from where I grew up and is three blocks from where my father and mother’s latest home is. (That particular neighborhood in Hollywood has always been so hard to shake that when my parents sold their house – the one I grew up in – and moved to Europe, they finally couldn’t take it anymore; they missed too many things about L.A. that Rome and Paris and Heidelberg just don’t offer – they missed winters you could gloss over, I think, mainly; they got one just like it a few blocks away. It was larger than the one I grew up in but otherwise just like it, so whenever I go home things don’t seem to have shrunk, like other people’s houses do when they return, or like my grammar school seemed to when I wandered through it once as an adult. Returning to L.A. my parents couldn’t think of the city as anyplace other than that part of Hollywood, near that corner of Beechwood and Franklin.)

The guy, whose name Lola thinks was Ted Kovokovitch (a Yugoslavian in California to plant grapes), met her within seconds.

“And there, right at that corner – you know? – I pulled up that damn taffeta and net skirt, pulled down those awful cotton drawers she always had us wear – and we—”

“You didn’t!” I cried.

“Yes. Twice.”

“But there’s a street lamp!” I said.

“Is there?” Lola asked, frowning a moment. “There wasn’t one then. All we had to worry about then was the Dinky.”

“The what?”

“The Dinky,” Lola said. “That little railroad train they used to have going up Canyon Drive. Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton – all those western pictures they made up at the end? – they’d carry the stars and all the extras right past Hein’s front window. It was the most amazing thing, looking out through all that Queen Victoria massive power of our living room – the drapes alone, my God, they must have weighed twenty pounds of velvet and lining and interlining, each panel – through the torrey pines that grew in our front yard, and there, going past on this tiny little car, not anywhere as big as a streetcar, that’s what they called it, the Dinky, would be this face – this face everyone in America knew. Everyone, that is, except Mother. Or any of her friends. But of course Mother wouldn’t even allow the servants to go to the movies, she thought them so immoral. And I have no idea where she thought we lived.”

“So the Dinky was all you were afraid of?” I asked.

“All he was afraid of, you mean,” Lola insisted, “I was an animal.”

“Well,” I said, “I was worse than an animal.”

“I beg your pardon?” she asked, the summer I was seventeen.

“Well, remember that dog Tango we used to have when I was ten or eleven?” I asked. She nodded her head. “Well, Tango and I began having an affair on the bathroom floor, sort of – not that he deflowered me or anything, I mean I did have some sense of the fitness of things, but you know I did let that Tango lick me every time I could lock us in the bathroom and lie down. The tiles were so mint green, Mother had just had it done. Anyway, I had to give him away.”

“Don’t tell me your poor mother found out?” Lola cried.

“No, it was worse,” I said, “it was worse. You see, he began waiting for me to come home from school or the beach – he’d wait there by the window day and night. I was afraid they’d get suspicious. The poor thing was obviously in love with me. And I could see that – well, I had to give him away. That summer we were up in Lake Arrowhead I did it because we were far away.”

“The poor thing,” Lola sighed, “he loved you.”

“See,” I said, “so I was worse than an animal.”

Lola looked at me for a moment and turned away.

“You’re sure you aren’t just trying to be polite?”

“Me?” I cried.

“That little dog with one blue eye and one brown eye?” she asked. “Why, your poor mother!”

“So what else did you do?” I asked, expectantly, longing for anything else she could tell me about being an animal.

“Oh,” she said, “there was the time there I was, in the Model T, stopped at a light on Hollywood Boulevard.” When suddenly, she was “. . . so overcome, I just had to . . .” and she licked her fingers right then and there, shooting her hand up her skirt before the light turned green.

“When I was done, and I was putting it into first gear, just in the very nick of time,” she laughed, “I looked up and saw all the people from the streetcar next to me, all watching – they’d seen everything.” She laughed now over it all, not turning scarlet with shame in the least which is what I still do whenever things I did like an animal catch up with me – or at least what I did when I imagined no one was looking, finding out I was wrong when it was too late. But I’ll probably always be turning scarlet whereas I don’t think Lola ever did, even when she looked up and saw the whole streetcar full of faces looking straight down into her lap.

In my day growing up in Southern California meant you didn’t grow up, at least not like girls did elsewhere. Having not grown up myself, like Lola, I know what it was exactly – what it is – to be a woman-looking person in your twenties with none of the trials and tribulations bogging down your whole life, driving you from one predictable crisis of adult life to the next until it’s too late. I, like Lola, was unable to take adult life seriously in my twenties at all and in fact sometimes I wonder, when I look at adult life even now, how on earth I got myself anywhere past my teens.

Every time the school counselor’s office called me down and wanted to know why a girl with my grades wasn’t planning on going “on” (i.e., to UCLA), I felt like oatmeal from head to toe.

The idea of doing anything once I got out of the twelfth grade – provided I could even get out since my spelling was impervious to tradition – besides just lying on the beach seemed too much to ask.

“Mother,” I once asked, “you don’t want me to become anything, do you?”

“Only what you really want to be,” she said.

“But what if I don’t really want to be anything?” I asked.

“I’m sure everything will be just fine,” she smiled.

But of course in those days, the early sixties, girls could still get away with “getting married and settling down with some lovely young man,” and the school counselor didn’t drive me as crazy as she probably would have later. Since looking at Sheena sitting in an office in the Administration Building at Hollywood High, it didn’t take a trained L.A. city school expert to realize all I cared about anyway was fun and men and trouble.

Of course there was one thing I wanted to do when I grew up, which I had known all along, and that was to invite people over and have dinner, like my mother.

The thing about L.A. is that there really was no place to sit down. Well, maybe the Stravinskys and people like that had houses where people could come over but most of the people they invited outside of my parents and me all had accents too. It seemed a shame to me that there was no one in all of L.A. who could speak without an accent and be invited over for dinner, and I just knew that there were plenty of people without accents who’d love to come over for dinner and who probably didn’t even know what it was like to sit down since they’d spent their lives in L.A. and therefore had no idea how interesting they were.

Already I knew that my best friend in high school – Franny – could talk a perfect blue streak and be every bit as gripping as the people my grandmother always said were brilliant.

And anyway, I didn’t necessarily want brilliant people coming over to sit down. I more wanted people who were more or less peculiar, like artists or writers or people Franny and I met hanging around Schwab’s who spent their life at Santa Anita going to the races (of course they had accents like people in Guys and Dolls which was fine with me). And I wanted people like my friend Ollie from junior high who’d been kicked out of Virgil, L.A.’s toughest pachuco high school at that time, and dumped on us at Le Conte where suddenly we had this Japanese girl, Ollie, in the tightest skirt anyone had ever seen, with a razor blade in her hairdo, who sat in the back of Algebra calling it “obnoxious” and getting called down to the principal’s office for disturbing the peace. All the people I’d ever met so far in my life who’d struck me as the least bit out-of-the-way I’d managed to keep track of, even when Ollie had been sent to Betsy Ross – the local reform school – and even when she got kicked out of there at the age of sixteen and married a car thief I still always knew where she was. And I wanted all my L.A. people one day to be invited into a large crumbling L.A. mansion (exactly like Franny’s which was my dream of a crumbling mansion from the moment she first showed it to me) to eat burritos and drink Rainier Ale and all meet my parents.

And I wanted my parents to invite their friends so the European accents could finally join up with all the other funny bohemians I knew in L.A. – and we could all sit down.

Naturally when I was in the school counselor’s office for the yearly question “What do you plan to do when you graduate?” I always stuck to my guns and said, “Oh, I don’t know.”

“But you’ve got to be careful that you don’t just drift,” she’d always say.

“Drifting” sounded fine to me, but to a school counselor it was the Biggest Danger life had to offer.

And that’s really all Lola cared about too until she was twenty-six when Vera Minsky discovered her.