Maybe you can see a pattern emerging in this story, but at the time I failed to spot it. I was too preoccupied; with auditions, with my career, with having a good time. The town felt different then, footloose and slightly lost, caught between classic old-time movie-making and the rising counterculture. They needed to cater to the new generation of rootless teens who were growing impatient with the world they’d been handed. The producers wanted to make renegade art statements but didn’t know how, and they couldn’t entirely surrender the movies of the past. People forget that Hello Dolly! came out the same year as Easy Rider.
Strange times. In Vietnam, Lt William Calley’s platoon of US soldiers slaughtered 500 unarmed Vietnamese, mainly women and children, at My Lai. Many of us had buddies over there, and heard stories of old women thrown down wells with grenades tossed in after them. Those who were left behind felt powerless, but there was an anger growing that seeped between the cracks in our daily lives, upsetting the rhythm of the city, the state, and eventually the whole nation. I’d never seen demonstrations on the streets of LA before now, and I’d heard the same thing was happening in Washington, Chicago, even in Denver.
But nothing affected the Hollywood elite; they hung on, flirting with subversion when really, what they wanted to make was musicals. They still threw parties, though, and the next one was a killer.
This was the real deal, a ritzy Beverly Hills bash with a sizeable chunk of the A-list present, thrown in order to promote yet another Planet Of The Apes movie. The sequels were losing audiences, so one of the executive producers pulled out the stops and opened up his mansion – I say his, but I think it had been built for Louise Brooks – to Hollywood royalty. This time there were security guards manning the door, checking names against clipboards, questioning everyone except the people who expected to be recognized. Certainly I remember seeing Chuck Heston there, although he didn’t look very happy about it, didn’t drink and didn’t stay long. The beautiful girls had turned out in force, clad in brilliantly jewelled mini-dresses and skimpy tops, slyly scoping the room for producers, directors, anyone who could move them up a career notch. A bunch of heavyweight studio boys were playing pool in the smoke-blue den while their women sat sipping daiquiris and dishing dirt. The talent agents never brought their wives along for fear of becoming exposed. I’d been invited by a hot little lady called Cheyenne who had landed a part in the movie purely because she could ride a horse, although I figured she’d probably ridden the producer.
So there we were, stranded in this icing-pink stucco villa with matching crescent staircases, dingy brown wall tapestries and wrought-iron chandeliers. I took Cheyenne’s arm and we headed for the garden, where we chugged sea breezes on a lawn like a carpet of emerald needles. Nearby, a fake-British band playing soft rock in a striped marquee filled with bronze statues and Santa Fe rugs. I was looking for a place to put down my drink when I saw the same uninvited group coming down from the house, and immediately a warning bell started to ring in my head.
It was a warm night in March, and most people were in the torch-lit garden. The Uninvited – that’s how I had come to think of them – helped themselves to cocktails and headed to the crowded lawn, and we followed.
“See those people over there?” I said to Cheyenne. “You ever see them before?”
She had to find her glasses and sneak them on, then shook her glossy black hair at me. “The square-jawed guy on the left looks like an actor. I think I’ve seen him in something. The girls don’t seem like they belong here.”
“What it is, I’m beginning to think there’s some really harmful karma around them.” I told her about the two earlier parties.
“That’s nuts,” she laughed. “You think they could just go around picking fights and nobody would notice?”
“People here don’t notice much, they’re too busy promoting themselves. Besides, I don’t think it’s about picking fights, more like bringing down a bad atmosphere. I don’t know. Let’s get a little closer.”
We sidled alongside one of the men, who was whispering something to the shorter, younger of the two girls. He was handsome in a dissipated way, she had small feral features, and I tried figuring them first as a couple, then part of a group, but couldn’t get a handle on it. The actor guy was dressed in an expensive blue Rodeo Drive suit, the other was an urban cowboy. The short girl was wearing the kind of cheap cotton sunflower shift they marked down at FedCo, but her taller girlfriend had gold medallions around her throat that must have cost plenty.
Now that I noticed, they were all wearing chains or medallions. The cowboy guy had a pony tail folded neatly beneath his shirt collar, like he was hiding it. Something about them had really begun to bother me, and I couldn’t place the problem until I noticed their eyes. It was the one thing they all had in common, a shared stillness. Their unreflecting pupils watched without moving, and stayed cold as space even when they laughed. Everyone else was milling slowly around, working the party, except these four, who were watching and waiting for something to happen.
“You’re telling me you really don’t see anything strange about them?” I asked.
“Why, what do you think you see?”
“I don’t know. I think maybe they come to these parties late, uninvited. I think they hate the people here.”
“Well, I’m not that crazy about our hosts, either,” she said. “We’re here because we have to be.”
“But they’re not. They just stand around, and cause bad things to happen before moving on,” I told Cheyenne. “I don’t know how or why, they just do.”
“Do you know how stoned that sounds?” she hissed back at me. “If they weren’t invited, how did they get through security?” She reached on tiptoe and looked into my eyes. “Just as I thought, black baseballs. Smoking dope is making you paranoid. Couldn’t you just try to enjoy yourself?”
So that’s what I did, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the guest dying in the pool, and the guy who had fallen down the stairs. We stayed around for a couple more hours, and were thinking about going when we found ourselves back with the Uninvited. A crowd had gathered on the deck and were dancing wildly, but there they were, the four of them, dressed so differently I couldn’t imagine they were friends, still sizing things up, still whispering to each other.
“Just indulge me this one time, okay?” I told Cheyenne. “Check them out, see if you can see anything weird about them.”
She sighed and turned me around so that she could peer over my shoulder. “Well, the square-jawed guy is wearing something around his neck. Actually, they all are. I’ve seen his medallion before, kind of a double-headed axe? It means God Have Mercy. There are silver beads on either side of it, take a look. Can you see how many there are?”
I checked him out. The dude was so deep in conversation with the short girl that he didn’t notice me. “There are six on each side. No, wait – seven and six. Does that mean something?”
“Sure, coupled with the double axe, it represents rebellion via the thirteen steps of depravity, ultimately leading to the new world order, the Novus Or dor Seclorum. It’s a satanic symbol. My brother told me all about this stuff. He read a lot about witchcraft for a while, thought he could influence the outcome of events, but then my mother made him get a job.” She pointed discreetly. “The girl he’s talking to is wearing an ankh, the silver cross with the loop on top? It’s the Egyptian symbol for sexual union. They’re pretty common, you get them in most head shops. Oh, wait a minute.” She craned over my shoulder, trying to see. “The other couple? She’s wearing a gold squiggle, like a sideways eight with three lines above it. That’s something to do with alchemy, the sign for black mercury maybe. But the guy, the cowboy, he’s wearing the most potent icon. Check it out.”