It was clear that the Virtuous Reality tour had entered another dimension when I stepped out of the baggage area at LAX and was greeted by a movie-star-handsome man in a grey suit holding a card that said "Mr. Kat." Soon, I was gliding past palm trees in a giant black limousine sent by The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder.
The limo was driven by a young actor named Stefan whose one-man celebration of "drama, musical rythms, and poetry inspired by the ancient spirits" was opening the next night at a Moroccan-Italian restaurant in West Hollywood. He was at my service for the evening, to take me to my hotel, then over to CBS, then back to the hotel or anywhere else I wanted to go.
He asked me what I'd written, and lit up when I said proudly that along with books and Web columns I was working on a play, one scene of which had been staged in New York City. He urged me strongly to finish it and he and gave me his card and urged me to call if I needed advice. "Take control," he said. "Be your own director. I'd dump the Web writing, if it were me. That can't go anywhere, if you don't mind my being honest."
Stefan, who was the director and producer of his show, explained that he drove a limo because it gave him the chance to meet "important people." He had to hurry to get to a TV so that he could see his 4-year-old daughter in a commercial that her manager had lined up. He loved driving the car, he explained, because it would inevitably lead to something. That, he said, was how things work in LA. Some talent, some hard work, some major luck, some help from friends. But in the final analysis, he told me, lightning had to strike.
Media can obsess on O. J. Simpson all they want, but the part of LA I was in is magical, hypnotic, and surreal far beyond my expectations. The hotel doorman, born in Guatemala, told me he's "in music," waiting for a new contract to come through so that he can shed his doorman's uniform. Although he's been opening limo doors and hailing cabs for three years, his agent says the deal is coming through any second.
He's never heard of the World Wide Web.
The concierge, five years from a small town in Iowa, has "three ideas in development." He has, he said, no time to go online.
Everyone in LA wants to know who you are right away, and are quite open about why. (San Franciscans, by contrast, don't care what you do, and New Yorkers pretend to ask because they're sincerely interested.) But in LA, connections count. In preparation for my trip here, I read Monster: Living Off the Big Screen, John Gregory Dunne's brilliant and touching new book about working in Hollywood. Things here, he says, just as Stefan had, function largely on the basis of personal relationships.
So people need to see if you're important, maybe one of those players whose eye you might catch and who can put somebody together with somebody. And since important people don't dress up here (consider Spielberg, I was told), you have to ask straight out.
Wired might consider itself hot stuff in the new order, but the very mention of the name is a conversation-stopper here. The notion of being wired seems in LA to be considered cute at best, mostly hilarious, and faintly ridiculous. At CBS studios later that night, three beautiful young women clutching autograph notebooks surrounded my limo as it pulled up to the studio entrance. "Who are you?" one asked. "I write for Wired," I said, reaching for the pen in my shirt pocket. "Oh," said one, "Really?" All three vanished instantly as another car pulled up.
At 6 a.m. the next day, I stopped in the hotel lobby for coffee and was surprised to hear a piano playing the Dance of the Hippo music from Fantasia. The piano player was an inanimate dummy with a beret and a name tag that said "Jean Mark." The Fantasia music kept playing and replaying. Jean Mark's fingers didn't even move. Across from the piano, the head of a Japanese family was taping Jean Mark from different angles in the lobby with a giant blinking Sony videocam mounted on a tripod, as his family suggested different shots and angles and bounced a portable hand-held light off of Jean-Mark's face.
I decided to get coffee somewhere else. I ended up in a Starbucks just off of Beverly Boulevard. The woman sitting next to me was drinking café au lait and eating a raisin scone. She had a giant Native American headdress on her head, and was wearing a Metallica T-shirt, shorts, and no shoes.
A spectacular and ancient diva sat across from us in a striking black suit, be-jewelled, turbaned, and heavily made up. A tiny, malevolent-looking grey poodle she introduced as "Jacques" popped its head out of a giant canvas bag in her lap. Jacques, she announced loudly, loved muffins and accepted contributions. The woman in the feathered headdress obediently brought over a piece of her scone, and I gave him a chunk of my oatmeal bran. A man came up behind us and gave Jacques a chunk of his bagel. Although Jacques' head wasn't as big as an ashtray, he ate like a wolf. The diva didn't thank us verbally, but nodded as we made our offerings.
In a corner table behind her sat a half-dozen Yuppie-looking middle-aged men and women with cell phones, laptops, charts, and graphs piled up in front of them. All sorts of noises were coming from their table as phones went off, laptops and calculators came on.
I got some coffee to go and I heard the woman at the counter yell to her co-workers that she'd "sighted Angelyne" the afternoon before.
Angelyne, she told me, is a mysterious aging sexpot who has billboards of herself up all over town in languid, busty, pink poses (she has a URL on the billboards), and who can sometimes be seen riding shotgun in a fuschia Corvette up and down Sunset Boulevard in outrageous pink costumes. Some young hunk, the kind on the covers of romance novels, is always driving.
Everybody knows about her, said the woman, but nobody knows who she is. (Email me if you know!)
"I've been wanting to see her for years," said the woman. "She's so outrageous! Up close, she's a bit grim."
I went back to the hotel and still had a half-hour before the LA book tour resumed. I flagged a cab and asked the driver if he knew where the remnants of Harry Houdini's mansion were. Sure, he said, everybody knew they were in Laurel Canyon. Fifteen minutes later, right past the brown house where Jim Morrison of The Doors lived, I saw the stone turrets, walls, columns, and stairs that are all that remain of Harry Houdini's spectacular mansion.
For 100 bucks, the driver said he'd take me to Bela Lugosi's tomb too. I was impressed. It was on my list. But how did he know I wanted to go there?
He shrugged. "Everybody who wants to see Houdini's house wants to see Bela Lugosi's tomb." I didn't think Random House would spring for the 100 bucks to visit Lugosi's resting place and I didn't have time anyway.
But did he know who "Angelyne" was? He smirked. "I can't help you there."
