There was another kind of guest there that night. Dell had invited some beautiful young girls. No one unsavoury, they weren’t call-girls, just absurdly perfect, with slender waists and basalt eyes. They stood together tapping frosted pink nails on the sides of their martini glasses, flicking their hair, looking about, waiting for someone to talk to them.
Parties like this took place all over the Hollywood hills; the old school still arrived in tuxedos and floor-length gowns, but studios had lately rediscovered the youth movie, and were shamelessly courting the same anti-establishment students they had ridiculed five years earlier. I had made a couple of very bad exploitation flicks, usually cast as the kind of comic sidekick whose only purpose was his amusing blackness. Back in those days I believed in visibility at any cost, and always took the work.
I had a feeling I’d been added to the guest list by Dell’s secretary in order to make up numbers and provide him with a sheen of coolness, because I wore fringed brown leather trousers and had my hair in an Afro, and hadn’t entirely lost my Harlem jive. He sure hadn’t invited me for my conversation; we’d barely spoken more than two words to each other. If we had, Dell would have realized I came from a middle-class family in New Jersey, and I might not have got the work.
I remember it was a cool night toward the end of November. The wind had dropped, and there were scents of patchouli and hashish in the air. The party was loosening up a little, the music rising in volume and tempo. Some of the beautiful girls were desultorily dancing together on a circular white rug in the lounge. I had been to a few of these parties and they always followed the same form, peaking at ten-thirty, with the guests calling for their cars soon after. People drank and drove more in those days, of course, but nobody of any importance stayed late because the studios began work at 4 a.m.
I was starting to think about leaving before undergoing the embarrassment of waiting for my battered Mustang to be brought around front, when there was a commotion of raised voices out on the patio, and I saw someone – a gaunt middle-aged man in a black suit – go into the pool fully dressed. It was difficult to find out what had happened, because everyone was crowding around the water’s edge. All I know is, when they pulled him out of the chlorine a minute later, he was dead. I read in the LA Times next day that he’d twisted his neck hitting the concrete lip as he went in, and had died within seconds. He was granted a brief obituary in Variety because he’d featured in a lame Disney film called Monkeys, Go Home. I remember thinking that the press reports were being uncharacteristically cautious about the death. I guess nobody wanted to risk implying that Dell had been keeping a disorderly house, and there was no suggestion of it being anything other than an unfortunate accident. Dell was a big player in a union town.
As I drove back to the valley that night, passing above the crystalline grid of the city, I passed one of the beautiful girls walking alone along the side of the road with her shoes in her hand, thumbing a ride, and knew she’d come here from the Midwest, leaving all her friends and family behind just so she could be hired as eye-candy to stand around at parties. I remember thinking how nobody would miss her if she disappeared. I felt sad about it, but I didn’t stop for her. Black men didn’t stop to pick up white girls back then; you didn’t want a situation to develop.
The work dried up for a couple of months, but on a storm-heavy night in February I was invited to another studio party, this time at a more low-key affair in Silverlake, where single palms crested the orange sky on the brows of hills, and Hispanic families sat in their doorways watching their kids play ball. You can tell poorer neighbourhoods by the amount of cabling they carry above their houses, and this area had plenty. I pulled over by an empty lot and was still map-reading under the street lamp when I heard the dull thump of music start up behind me, and realized the party was being held in a converted brownstone loft – they were pretty much a novelty back then – so I parked and made my way to the top floor of the party.
The building’s exterior may have been shabby, but the inside was Carrier class. The whole top floor had been stripped back to brickwork and turned into one big space, because the owner was a photographer who used it as his studio. He handled on-set shoots for Paramount, and had coincidentally taken my head-shots a couple of years earlier. It was good to think he hadn’t forgotten me, and this event was a lot friendlier than the last. I recognized a couple of girls I’d auditioned with the month before, and we got to talking, then sharing a joint. The music was Hendrix - Electric Ladyland, I think. Pulmonary gel-colours spun out across the walls, and the conversation was louder, edgier, but it was still a pretty high-end layout.
It was the photographer’s thirtieth birthday and he’d invited some pretty big names, but it was getting harder to tell the old money from the new, because everyone was dressed down in beads and kaftans. The new producers and actors were sprawled across canary-yellow beanbags in a narcoleptic fug, while the industry seniors stuck to martinis at the bar. I was having a pretty good time with my lady-friends when I saw them again.
Perhaps because nobody had noticed me at Dell’s house, I noticed everything, and now I recognized the new arrivals as they came in. There were four of them, two girls and two men, all in late-teens to mid-twenties, and I distinctly recalled them from Dell’s Christmas party because they’d stood together in a tight group, as though they didn’t know anyone else. They were laughing together and watching everyone, as though they were in on a private joke no one else could share.
I admit I was a little stoned and feeling kind of tripped out, but there was something about them I found unsettling. I got the feeling they hadn’t been invited, and were there for some other purpose. They stayed in the corner, watching and whispering, and I wanted to go up to them, to ask what they were doing, but the girls were distracting me and – you know how that goes.
I left a few minutes after midnight, just as things were starting to heat up. I went with the girls back to their hotel. They needed a ride, and I needed the company. When I woke up the next morning, they had already vacated the room. There was only a lipstick-scrawled message from them on the bathroom mirror, plenty of kisses but no contact numbers. I picked up the industry dailies in the IHOP on Santa Monica, and there on page five found a report of the party I’d attended the night before. Some high-society singer I’d vaguely recalled seeing drunkenly arguing with his girlfriend had fallen down the stairs as he left the party, gone all the way from the apartment door to the landing below. He was expected to recover but might have sustained brain damage. Fans were waiting outside his hospital room with flowers.
Two parties, two accidents – it happens. There were studio parties all over town every night of the week, but it felt weird that I’d been at both of them. You had to be invited, of course, but there wasn’t the strict door policy that there is now, no security guards with headsets, sometimes not even a checklist. People came and went, and it was hard to tell if anyone was gatecrashing; the hosts generally assumed you wouldn’t dare. They were insulated from the world. I remember attending a shindig in Brentwood where the toilet overflowed through the dining room, and everyone acted like there was nothing wrong because they assumed the maids would clear it up. Hollywood’s like that.