Lunch with Lizabeth

CLAREMONT 1977

Never meet your idols.

The origins of this adage can be traced to 1865, when Gustave Flaubert wrote in Madame Bovary: "You should never touch your idols: a little of the gold always rubs off." Twenty years later, Louisa May Alcott chimed in that one of her literary little women, "could not conceal her disappointment…feeling as so many of us have felt when we discover that our idols are very ordinary men and women."

At fourteen, I hadn’t given the idea of meeting an idol much thought. The only two famous people I’d met were race car driver Mario Andretti, on a trip organized by the Cub Scouts to the Ontario Motor Speedway, and Al Lewis, better known as Grandpa Munster to TV viewers like myself, on the Universal Studios tour. They didn’t impress me much, especially Grandpa Munster, who kissed my cheek and sent me on an uncontrollable crying jag.

So, it was a great surprise that in the second month of my freshman year in high school I unexpectedly got first-hand evidence of the don’t meet your idols aphorism being true.

Claremont, California where I grew up is a lovely college town about 40 miles east of Holly­wood. By 1977, the endless expanse of orange groves that lined the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains were being leveled to make way for the proliferous tracts of new housing being built to accommodate the influx of families moving to prosperous Southern California.

Tim and Bill were my best friends. Before high school we went to different schools. Tim was going to the venerable El Roble Junior High and Bill and I were at the temporary La Puerta, a one-building school that was quickly fabricated to deal with the massive expansion of Northern Claremont. The three of us shared a passion for the movies and had been making Super 8 films together since we met in the Boy Scouts several years earlier. I knew I was on a path to Holly­wood with titles like Dracula Goes to the Orthodontist and The Day Toilet Paper Ruled The World in the can. The three of us worked tirelessly for years on our magnum opus called Wapper, an experimental gothic horror film with musical numbers and comedy skits.

Finally united at Claremont High School, we were coming of age and becoming increasingly interested in art, especially cinema, the seventh art, which we were starting to take seriously. Unlike our peers who were more concerned with sports, drugs and sex, we’d use our collective resources to find a willing mother or older sibling to drive us to the neighboring Montclair Cinema or Fox Theater in Pomona for any double feature we could get into. If we were lucky there would be something good playing at the ancient red brick Village Theater in downtown Claremont that we could ride our bikes to. As our own brand of perceived sophistication developed, sometimes we’d pull a bait-and-switch and tell our unsuspecting moms that we were going to see something cute like the G-rated THE LITTLE PRINCE (1974) with the PG-rated THE DOVE (1974), but then give our money to a willing stranger (who was over 18) to buy us tickets for the R-rated double feature of Robert Altman’s CALIFORNIA SPLIT (1974) and THE GAMBLER (1974) with James Caan. We were so over the kid’s stuff. We could handle the blood, swearing and naked boobs.

Word was going around campus that there was a movie-of-the-week being filmed for television at the newly-built Griswold’s Hotel complex which was down the street. We could see the camera trucks and mobile dressing rooms that had rolled in for the production. Hanging out after school, the three of us were titillated by the unusual prospect of seeing a real movie in action and decided to walk down and check it out.

We excitedly wandered around, finding the clusters of trucks and generators and then following the electrical cables to the epicenter of production: the hotel lobby. Lights, cameras, and lots of action.

A fake elevator had been constructed in the center of the reception area which allowed for the actors to be filmed from the front first and then the back, as guys off-camera slid the elevator doors in and out of place so the camera could capture the desired reverse angles. Quietly observing the professionals, we got how it worked and nodded at each other, glowing with newly acquired insider knowledge. The film’s cast of four included an actor playing a bellhop, who never broke character, and three older women playing the elevator passengers. One of the actresses pulled a gun from her purse to show the others that it was actually a lighter. She looked amazingly familiar. Then her voice reached our eardrums. I thought I could feel the rumble of her stentorian lady-growl in the floor.

Oh my GOD! We looked at each other in utter amazement. Is that really Lauren Bacall? We may have only been 14, but all three of us knew she was the real deal, an honest to goodness legend. She was 53 at the time and well known to TV audiences because of her long-running series of commercials for High Point decaffeinated instant coffee. In the ads, she’d have multiple orgasms smelling it, moaning in ecstasy before declaring it the coffee-lovers dream. She’d pour the crystals onto a tray and cry out:

Look at that deep, rich color! Bursting with flavor!

She’d grab your attention saying something clever that made no sense, like:

My favorite time of day is night.

Or;

Writing is a coffee lover’s dream. That page took four cups.

Concurrently on another channel, actress and real life housewife Patricia Neal was making a comeback of sorts in a competing commercial as a rapturous caffeine addict with no time on her hands, the official shill for a rival brand of instant coffee, Maxim. We were perhaps too young to know about Ms. Neal’s impressive history as a two-time Academy Award winning actress or that her sabulous voice was the result of a stroke, but everyone knew Bacall was a huge star from the Golden Era of Holly­wood and was famously married to Humphrey Bogart. We had seen Howard Hawks’ classic TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (1944) on television where she says her famous line to Bogie:

You know how to whistle, don’t you? You just put your lips together and blow.

Yup, that’s her. That’s Lauren Bacall. This must be her first TV movie.

Besides we three teenage boys with braces and backpacks, there was another gentleman watching with the same rapture. I’d seen this greasy guy lurking in the stacks of the Claremont Public Library before. I always wondered how he made a living.

Must be tough for her, doing television.

We were hip to the fact that TV stars and movie stars were two separate entities. Farrah was not a movie star and Gene Wilder did not do TV. We would snigger aloud in the theater, five years later, when we saw TV star Cher in the preview for SILKWOOD (1983) alongside film star Meryl Streep. Yes, we were already little film snobs.

And the director over there, he was a huge child star in the Depression named Jackie Cooper. He was a Little Rascal.

The weird guy was right. He also tipped us off that the other actresses were Lisa Pelikan and Sandy Dennis. We pretended we already knew that although we had no idea who they were.

Now we were really invested. We watched an entire take with bated breath. Blah, blah, blah, then Bacall whipped the gun out her purse and pointed it at the bellboy. Jackie Cooper yelled, cut.

Lauren Bacall was a true presence and had the carriage and bearing of a great lady. It was like seeing Mount Rushmore. So famous and so iconic. Her steely countenance revealed nothing, not even the hint of a smile at having just nailed a scene in one take. Her attitude and body language were clear, she wasn’t doing a second. Everyone seemed fearful of her and kept telling her how great she was. Imperiously ignoring them, the scene was officially over when she crossed the lobby and left the building. Tim, Bill, and I looked at each other in panic. What now?

We followed her. She was fast but we were too. Feeling our teenage energy building behind her, she picked up the pace. She sped out the back of the hotel, crisscrossed through some parked cars, and doubled back into the open door of her dressing room trailer. It slammed shut.

Her big, air-conditioned Winnebago was stationed in the back of the parking lot and completely unattended. Production didn’t expect there would be ravenous fans way out in the sticks of the suburbs, so there was no security. It was an odd sensation to be standing right outside, knowing Lauren Bacall was inches away on the other side of a thin trailer door. We couldn’t imagine what she was doing in there and started speculatively joking and laughing. We cracked each other up deciding if she was watching a soap opera on TV or drinking decaffeinated instant coffee. We hovered outside that trailer for what seemed like an hour, giggling and whistling. The communal mantra became "You know how to whistle, don’t you?" as we’d try to contain our nervous laughter.

Since I was the most ravening of the pack, I became designated asker of the autograph. We rummaged from our backpacks one blank piece of paper (in reality, the back of a yellow mimeographed test that didn’t have any writing on it), a pen and Bill’s trumpet case so she would have a hard surface to sign on. Win ugly, leave nothing to chance.

After twenty additional minutes of waiting, we realized the pen didn’t work and got distracted trying to find another in the crevices of our overstuffed backpacks. She must have been spying on us, because as we were trying to get the next pen’s ink to flow, she slipped out. I looked up in alarm. The old bird was getting away!

I raced after her holding the trumpet case with the yellow paper and the dead pen and said very politely:

Miss Bacall, may I please have your autograph?

I almost collided with her as she abruptly stopped on a dime and spun around. I was face to face with Lauren Bacall. She was a magnificent cobra! Hissing at me with her flared hood and burning eyes, her baritone rasp undermined me as the scorching glare revealed the fires of hell in her hazel irises.

Get lost!

I was paralyzed in both terror and ecstasy from her venom. Before I blinked, she did an about face and vanished.

Tim and Bill stood in stunned disbelief, faces frozen from the shock. Bill broke the silence.

What an asshole.

I was quite shaken, mostly with surprise. As soon as reality began to set in, any love or admiration I had for Lauren Bacall became improbable. She was never my idol, per se. She represented something to me that I idolized which was Holly­wood. It was a flamboyant obsession that was looked down upon by my father. He was never thrilled that his son had 8x10 glossies of Judy Garland and Joan Crawford on his bedroom walls. These camp icons were not my favorites, but their pictures were readily available. The obscure and exotic tastes I was cultivating were more along the lines of Sonja Henie, Carmen Miranda, and Esther Williams but they didn’t sell those 8x10s at Movieland Wax Museum.

Lauren Bacall was a member of the stratosphere, as far as her fame meter went. Still, I had to wonder how such an unpleasant lady got to sit on the president’s piano.

Tim, Bill, and I laughed all the way home with another great story to add to our repertoire of adolescent adventures. From that moment forward, meeting idols didn’t seem like something I would ever pursue again, let alone make a career of.

But then, I hadn’t met Lizabeth Scott.

PARIS 1984

One of the greatest idols of my young life was the City of Lights, Paris. My early desire to travel and discover other cultures came from the enchanting children’s book, This is Paris by Miroslav Šašek. I discovered it in the first grade and dreamed that one day I would be a Parisian. There were two more in this series, This is New York and This is Venice that inspired similar fantasies, but none as passionate as my ever growing Francophilia and desire for all things French.

So, graduating high school, the three reasons I wanted to go to Columbia University were:

that it was in New York City;

that it offered a degree in comparative literature, which was acceptable to the American Film Institute in Holly­wood, where I planned on getting my master’s degree and;

that it had a satellite campus in Paris.

Going to college in New York City was the best education a guy like me could ever have. After a rocky start, I got my sea legs and really started to spread the wings I had been holding tightly when I was under my father’s roof.

Between all the great repertory movie houses that existed in New York City at the time and the graduate film courses I was able to finagle myself into, my first 2½ years at Columbia felt like the Evelyn Wood speed course in the history of cinema. Andrew Sarris, the legendary critic from the Village Voice, was my first film professor freshman year and I was smitten with what he had to offer. He was an unusual looking man, the kind of person I had never seen in California. His appearance suggested he had been locked away in a movie theater his entire life and had never seen the sun. His distinctive speaking voice had a nasally kind of slur that kept me on the edge of my seat. Everything he said sounded brilliant to my eager ears.

He provided an introduction to the French New Wave that took me by surprise and really turned on my brain. The first film he screened was Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960). Having only seen it on the 3:30 movie on Channel 7, laden with commercial interruptions and cut to fit the time slot, I was mesmerized by this version with the widescreen cinematography and the natural wonder of John Gavin’s bare chest. The notion that fancy French artists like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Goddard idolized our commercial American director absolutely blew my mind. I never considered Hitchcock an artist since I had not considered Holly­wood true cinema but, rather, mainstream product for the masses. Woody Allen heavily influenced my notion that California was a cultural wasteland.

Hitchcock, an American institution, was born English but had become a U.S. citizen in 1955. It was clear that foreign filmmakers agreed with Brit Quentin Crisp when he said, I’ve always been American in my heart, ever since my mother took me to the movies.

The Village Voice was listing so many films I had only ever read about in books as ‘now playing’ at the Thalia, the Regency, Cinema Village, Theatre 80 St. Marks, the Holly­wood Twin, the Metro, and elsewhere. I discovered vast new worlds of cinema and life-changing people like Jayne Mansfield, Pier Paolo Pasolini, John Waters, and Russ Meyer as well as current films from all over the globe. To finally be able to see all of the Busby Berkeley movies I knew everything about but had never seen a frame of, up there on the big screen with no commercials, was like finding the best drug in the universe. It took me