To many folks who
live outside of Southern California, Los Angeles is synonymous
with Hollywood. And the Hollywood of their imagination is not
the Hollywood of reality which, while lively, can be tawdry and
no place to see movie stars except those set in the sidewalk.
That imaginary Hollywood
has little to do with the real thing but is a mixture of Beverly
Hills and the movie and TV studios. The imaginary Hollywood is
a place where you could get a crick in your neck trying to take
in all the famous faces and a dent in your wallet paying the tab
at chic restaurants and boutiques. And the imaginary people who
live in imaginary Hollywood--out every night where a $100 dinner
is just getting by or at parties with guest lists out of fan magazines.
Glamorous folks all, living glamorous lives.
The real Los Angeles
is less like the imaginary Hollywood that it is like the real
Houston, where Dody and I were born and raised, without the mosquitoes
and humidity. The citizens live their lives pretty much like regular
people. I’ll give you a typical evening out for an ordinary Los
Angeleno.
Dody and I sometimes
go out to dinner with a writer friend and her writer husband.
Do we go to Ivy At the Shore, where there’s a chance of seeing
someone we’ve seen on the silver screen? No, we go to Hamburger
Hamlet, where there are folks like us except they mostly aren’t
writers, except the waiters and waitresses who haven’t sold anything
yet. Afterward we go to their condo for a little excitement, like
the time our friend had a little gadget she wanted us to try.
We sat around her dining room table doing just that. Taking our
blood pressure. Because that was what the gadget was for. Of course
it was a Saturday night. Weeknights are kind of dull.
However. There are
those who did live something close to the imagined Hollywood life.
There was this12-year-old girl who accepted as a matter of course
evenings that a full-grown woman anywhere else would consider
special. She saw her first stage musical at four. She saw The
Wiz, Evita, Annie, Pirates of Penzance, Sophisticated Ladies,
The Nutcracker, Hello Dolly and La Cage Aux Folles . And saw most
of them from house seats. Usually she went backstage to visit
the stars. When I asked her about it she was surprised. “Doesn’t
everyone?” she said. When she first started going to stage shows
she wanted to go backstage and visit at intermissions. Took her
a while to understand that wasn’t done. Even by her.
At the age of nine,
after Hello, Dolly she went to visit Carol Channing in
her dressing room and when she came out demanded, “What we gonna
do now?” It was after midnight. She went home. Her parents needed
the rest.
A few days before New
Year’s Eve she asked her parents what party would they be taking
her to.
“Not Sidney and Joanna’s,
I hope,” she said. “When we went there last New Year’s and it
was so boring.”
I said, “Sidney and
Joanna?” “
Sidney Poitier and
his wife, Joanna Shimkus,” her father explained.
She went on school
trips to Disneyland, Magic Mountain and Marine Land and visited
the San Diego Zoo, Wild Animal Park (where you stay in the car
and the animals roam free), the moored Queen Mary (she spent the
night in a stateroom on it) and Santa Claus Village.
Her favorite restaurant
was Chasen’s (closed now) , where she had the good taste not to
like the chili. She was familiar with fettuccini Alfredo, pommes
du terre soufflé, sushi and virgin strawberry daiquiris.
She ate Japanese and Chinese food with chopsticks, dexterously.
There was a time she
said she was going to follow in her father’s footsteps.
“I’m going to be an
actors’ agent,” she said. “The best because the best is going
to teach me. My father.”
Then she began going
to a tutor not far from her father’s office. Her tutorial sessions
ended about an hour before he left for the day. Her mother thought
it a good idea for her to go to his office and wait there to drive
home with him. Which she did.
She went through his
desk, examined his memos and correspondence, appropriated some
of his personalized notepads, interrogated his secretary and observed
him on the telephone, where a busy agent spends much of his time
and all the closing hours of his working day.
When she got home,
she announced she’d changed her mind. She didn’t want to be an
agent.
“It’s boring,” she
said. “All he did the whole time was talk on the phone.”
“If you don’t want
to do what your father does, then what do you want to do?” I asked.
“I want to do what
my mother does. Nothing.”
David Westheimer lives
with his wife of 55 years, Dody, in the same Los Angeles apartment
they moved into from Houston, Texas 39 years ago. Their son, Fred,
is a Senior Vice-President at the William Morris Agency and his
younger brother, Eric, is a veterinarian. Succeeding generations
include five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. As a journalist,
David worked for Oveta Culp Hobby. At 83, David Westheimer continues
to write, and not just for Senior Women. His latest effort, "The
Great Wounded Bird", his recollections of World War II, winner
of the Texas Review 1999 poetry prize, was published this year
by Texas Review Press and may be ordered from Amazon Books, where
it is 1,458,159th on their sales list, from Barnes & Noble and
Borders Books. He is a novelist and a retired Air Force Officer.
He can be reached for a repertoire of feigned curmudgeonly remarks
at: DWestheime@aol.com.
