Deja vu

Last fall I drove to a book party at the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles---a mere five hundred mile jaunt.  Oh, don't worry about my queer extravagances---I was multitasking the whole time, picking up sweet deals on seasonal closeouts at nurseries along the way, visiting family and friends---hoping to be inspired to finished one of my own quasi-literary projects.

That afternoon a high tropical overcast broke free at the edge of the San Fernanado Valley, and I broke free of the Ventura Freeway at Topanga Canyon to drive the Boulevard.  Not because it is faster, but because I had the luxury to do so instead of rushing along like everyone else in a walled off world as representational as the Los Angeles River.  On Ventura Boulevard the traffic is more tidal---bowling forward and hissing back, cars like kelp breaking off and stranding behind a beached whale of a bus.  Yet there is still room enough to recall the story of my grandfather's 1936 Buick---the one that lost a rear wheel and squatted down on the same street, while the wheel itself continued on its way to Glendale.  The wheel eventually lost its bearings and wondered off into a storefront. Great Great Aunt Ada---who once described herself as "slightly smaller than a Buick"---cried in the back seat, thinking she was the cause of the mishap.

Ventura Blvd at Tampa --- circa 1950

Hang a right on Havenhurst and one can drive into the past.  The walnut groves are gone, but the 1930s haciendas are not---still prominent midst their latter day crop of post war homes.  A turn to the right, a swing to the left and then the climb through the decades begins---topping out in the swinging sixties where the pavement ends on Mulholland Drive.  Heading east again, my car sways south and north along the ridge, catching views from Catalina to Mulholland's Cascades at San Fernando.  The indirect afternoon light is like a memory, revealing and softly surreal.  A dozen lifetimes caught in amber, that low smudge of smog creeping northwest along the base of the Verdugo Mountains.

The canyon roads bisect the way: Beverly Glen, Coldwater, Laurel.  Topless tourist vans stop to focus on the inner galaxy of stars below them.  My eyes follow suit but briefly and then my mind wonders back to Sunday walks up Outpost Drive from my courtyard apartment on Franklin.  The compound was built to corral Paramount's starlets in the 1920s, to plant and nurture the seeds of glamor---a trait gone extinct in our now-hostile environment.  Fakery is now more direct, less sophisticated.  Twerk it, baby.

Mulholland at the Caheuenga Parkway --- circa 1940

Approaching Caheuenga Pass the downtown skyline appears to the southeast like a Golden City of Oz.  Mulholland twists down and vaults over a river of cars on the Hollywood Freeway and then gets lost in the other Hollywood---the one with the lake and the sign that the movies did not build.  The largely exotic landscape grows lush and hangs over serpentine concrete streets, muffling the outside world.  Not much has happened here since Peg Entwistle jumped off the thirteenth letter of the HOLLYWOODLAND sign in 1932.  She was an actress, but we'll never know if her launching spot was symbolic or merely convenient for her, being a resident of Hollywoodland's Beachwood Canyon for that last year.  The LAND ending was eventually scrapped and what remained recycled to sell a much bigger commodity---leaving the neighborhood to lose itself under swaths of magenta bougainvillea and the gentle sway of creamy angel trumpets.

Hollywoodland --- circa 1930

There is no way but down from here, at least while behind the wheel.  Franklin, Hollywood---the merge onto Sunset.  This stretch of boulevard looks way better than it did twenty five years ago, yet proudly retains its edgier establishments.  Familiar shops have moved here, escaping other once-fringe neighborhoods of Hollywood that have gone twee.  Silver Lake, Echo Park---and finally Figueroa and downtown Los Angeles.  I'm only an hour early.

Emerging from the parking garage under the Central Library into the pink twilight, I wander across Meguire Gardens and up Hope Street's Spanish Steps.  A young bearded businessman smiled indulgently as I reached for the stony cascade of water at hand atop the meandering central divider.  It's a quirky feature, this waist high brook---as if it rose from the past into this forest of skyscrapers.  And there I am in my cowboy boots and western print shirt, flicking a finger through the water.  His eye contact with me is direct yet fleeting as his dress shoes click on down the steps.

At the top of the stairs I head north and then east towards an opening in the glass forest.  California Plaza is the kind of vast public place of sheets of water, stairs and terraces where Busby Berkeley could put a thousand dancing girls through their paces---with perhaps a gratuitous tracking shot of City Hall through a tunnel of the best legs on the lot.  A dark blue glamor spreads over the scene, nearly empty of people in spite of the warm night.  Square domestic tableaus light up overhead, climbing skyward like digital sparks.

KRKD radio towers and City Hall --- 1930

I find myself on the eastern edge of the plaza, next to the upper landing of Angel's Flight.  To the north is the iconic monolith that is City Hall, to the east southeast a Beaux Arts building lit up like a wedding cake aflame.  Farther south is a blue black bulk of a building topped with twin spires---archaic radio antenna towers, each with the letters KRKD silhouetted against the lit horizon.  I scan this view, over and over, like a meditation---until the atmosphere is dense with the layers of time.  Now the Lindbergh Beacon is slowly rotating atop City Hall, the Beaux Arts building is softer, whiter---and the now red letters on the antennas are spelling out each letter downward: K-R-K-D.  Then the call letters flash as a whole.  I watch the neon cycle, unsure of what I'm seeing.  The letters' action is likely lost to history; perhaps they never displayed more than static indifference.  Yet the letters continued to cascade and then flash as a whole.  I return my attention to City Hall and its relatively well known Lindbergh Beacon, darkened after Pearl Harbor and only recently reinstalled and lit for special occasions.  It is not lit now, that I know because the beam it throws cannot cut the modern urban glare---but there is that beam, spinning slowly round.  I'm not looking into the past but looking through layers of it, as the glass forest remains.

I am not alone.  I'm aware again of the usual characters of the past around me, but there is someone new.  I am unsure, because the new presence is akin to an old favorite---but Linda is stepping back, making space for her look alike.  It is the subject of the book, the reason for the party I'm about to attend.  She is dressed better than my other specters of that era, and I suddenly feel shy---focusing on the bias cut of her chic dress, the silk covering the glimpse of leg above her pumps.

"Don't you think it's time to go?"

Ann Dvorak

Her voice is unmistakable, one that still sounds modern after its initial impact on the silver screen some eighty years ago.  It is Ann Dvorak.  I catch the flash of her smile---understanding, open, indulgent---and I follow.  And the rest of my gang follows along.

It is too bad the author doesn't believe in such things.  She is a librarian at the library I'm about to enter, and she's just been through the seasonal spate of people suddenly interested in researching the past owners of their houses because they are haunted.  She posted on Facebook that her poker face was getting good practice because "THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS HAUNTED HOUSES."  I suppose not, at least in the pop culture sense.  The thrill is not in the fright, but to connect.

I turn back towards the Central Library, my spectral cloud tagging along as I drop down the Spanish Steps.  Outside of Ann, we're a casual crowd.  Linda---who really could be Ann's stand in---is dressed in a print frock and the man---who is an actual contemporary of Ann's---is in trousers and sweater.  We move along not in close knit form but as a contingent of compatriots with our own agendas.

Richard Cromwell and Ann Dvorak in The Strange Love of Molly Louvain, 1932

They disappear when I enter the library and everyday anxieties take over me.  Meeting Room A is to the right and I pause, considering my unfashionably early entrance.  The door is open, people come and go.  I'm not the only one.  I take a deep breath and enter, only to immediately encounter at my right a larger than life black and white projection of the man who had just accompanied me back to the library.  Richard Cromwell, now costumed as a bell boy, is exchanging lines with knocked up and spiraling downward Ann Dvorak in The Strange Love of Molly Louvain---the book party's first feature of peripheral entertainment.  I grin at the image, reminded that they'll take every opportunity to regain my attention.

The author, Christina Rice, espies me from across the room and flashes one of her trademark million watt smiles.  That smile, those dark locks and bangs---her perfect pale skin personify the second tier, slightly saucy vintage Hollywood look.  She slowly makes her way through the growing crowd towards me.

"This is crazy," she gasps as she draws near.  "Nobody comes to a library book party early."

Christina pauses, eying me---a stranger but on Facebook.  My body language must be more relaxed than I am, as she assumes a pose of offering a hug---and I happily oblige.

"I can't believe you drove all that way," she says once she releases me.  "I hope you had other reasons to make the trip."

I assure her I did, and after a few other niceties we could have settled into a getting to know you type of conversation if not for the ever growing population of the room.  Christina glances around and smiles apologetically.  She must get back to her duties.

It would be the last of the personal contact I experienced at the party, outside of standing in line to buy for a library-supporting premium her book  Ann Dvorak: Hollywood's Forgotten Rebel and having her sign it.  I stand a good five feet from the wall to avoid being the proverbial wallflower, but there's no getting around that this is what I am.  I perennially try to make eye contact with strangers, and occasionally they reflect my silent plea, but it seems nobody is a stranger but me.  Singles unexpectedly couple up or bump into people they haven't seen in twenty years.  They pile up at the refreshment table, tasting purported Ann Dvorak recipes pulled from old movie magazines and newspapers.  It's at once alienating and heartening, being part of this love fest for the author and her subject.

Mary Carlisle, 1930s

There is a guest of honor.  She sits under a large blowup of a newsprint photo of her young self along side Ann Dvorak.  She looks surprising spry for a woman batting a hundred, dressed in shades of hot pink---right down to her sneakers.  The laces are missing, and there are suggestions that her feet are swollen, but her hair is remarkable.  Dyed a becoming pale shade of strawberry blonde, it falls thick and wavy to her narrow shoulders.  Large sunglasses complete her look in spite of the subdued lighting---something I choose to believe is less about attitude and more about something like macular degeneration.  Occasionally the boys stop and stoop to pay homage to her, chatting for awhile before moving on, but the one steady by her side is a middle-aged woman that must be her companion/caretaker.

I should go over and talk to Mary Carlisle.  She starred with Richard Cromwell in Baby Face Morgan, after all.  But I do not move.  I feel totally opposite of my experience at California Plaza an hour before.  She might not remember Richard, or tell me something that I can't believe.  I can't recall any other movie Mary Carlisle was in.  I play polite conversation in my head but can't make myself walk over.  Instead I stand and watch a movie silenced by the din in the room.

Enter an old homeless woman---most certainly the fairy godmother of Pippi Longstocking.  Tiny as a sparrow, she sports stripped stockings topped by clothing in tight layers.  Her granny cart is similarly packed, and she parks it in a dark corner and then stands a few feet from me.  Great.  Guilt by association.  But her proximity grows on me, even when guests catch her out of the corner of their eye and then quickly look away.  We watch the film on our own little island away from humanity, she never seeking eye contact as I do.  She wanders off to discreetly wedge her way to the rapidly diminishing refreshment table, and I hope she finds something to her liking.

Pippi's godmother again returns to watch the film.  I've seen it so many times that I can almost hear the dialog, so I wonder what she's getting out of it.  No one else is watching but us, and she looks enthralled.  Childlike.  I can imagine her in a movie palace as a little girl, lost in the magic---and maybe, briefly, forgetting a horrible reality.  The End flashes on the screen, and she raises her tiny hands in the air to applaud like a grateful audience at the greatest stage performance ever.  One palm hits the other, and then stop in mid motion.  Her hands quickly retreat from their heights, suddenly aware of the situation, of the segregated reality we all live in.