Imagine, for a second, this:
It’s 1959. You’re a girl, 15 years old. Your parents are bohemians before the category becomes a fashionable one. Your dad, Sol, born in Brooklyn, is first violinist for the Twentieth Century Fox Orchestra. First violinist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic too, and a Fulbright scholar. He once got into a fistfight over the proper way to play the dotted notes in Bach. Your mom, Mae, is an artist. A work of art, as well, so beautiful is she, and charming. Your godfather is Igor Stravinsky. He’s been slipping you glasses of scotch under the table since you turned 13, and his wife, the peerlessly elegant Vera, taught you how to eat caviar. Your house, on the corner of Cheremoya and Chula Vista at the foot of the Hollywood Hills, is always full-to-bursting with your dad’s hip musician friends: Jelly Roll Morton and Stuff Smith, Joseph Szigeti and Marilyn Horne. There are tales of earlier picnics along the L.A. River with Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard, Greta Garbo, Bertrand Russell, and the Huxleys. The two Kenneths, Rexroth and Patchen, perform readings in your living room regularly. But poetry bores you blind, so you talk Lucy Herrmann, wife of movie composer Bernard—Bennie to you—into telling you stories upstairs. Arnold Schoenberg just laughs when you and your sister, Mirandi, get stuck together with bubble gum in the middle of the premiere of his latest piece at the Ojai Music Festival.
Now imagine this:
You’re a sophomore at Hollywood High. It’s that dead time between classes and you’re in the girls’ room, smoking one of the 87 cigarettes you share daily with Sally. Sally, who before she even transferred to Hollywood High had been through the wringer at Twentieth Century Fox, signed to a contract and then summarily dropped because she’d bleached her hair an eyeball-scorching shade of platinum the night before she was supposed to report for her first day of work, rendering herself superfluous because, unbeknownst to her, the studio had been planning to make her the next natural-type beauty in the Jean Seberg mold. Sally, who finds mornings so onerous she has to chase 15 milligrams of Dexamyl with four cups of thin coffee just to drag herself to first period. Sally, who is rich and surly and sex-savvy and has recently been taken up by a group of twenty-somethings from her acting class, the Thunderbird Girls you call them, if only in your head, knockouts all, cruising around town in—what else?—Thunderbird convertibles, spending their nights on the Sunset Strip, their weekends in Palm Springs with the ring-a-ding likes of Frank Sinatra. Sally, who is your best friend.
The company you keep is fast, which is O.K. by you since fast, as it so happens, is just your speed. No woof-woof among sex kittens you. Not with your perfect skin and teeth, hair the color of vanilla ice cream, secondary sexual characteristics that are second to none. The year before, when you were 14, you went to a party you weren’t supposed to go to. A right kind of wrong guy—an Adult Male, a big beef dreamboat galoot, just what you’d had in mind when you sneaked out of the house—told you he’d give you a ride home. You jumped at the offer. But when you lost your nerve, confessed your age, he pulled the car over to the side of the road. “Don’t let guys pick you up like this, kid—you might get hurt,” he said, undercutting this gruff bit of fatherly advice by laying a five-alarm kiss on you. He drove off without telling you his name. A few months passed and there was your white knight in black-and-white, on the front page of every paper in town. He’d had a run-in with another under-age girl, only this encounter had ended in penetration: her knife in his gut. Johnny Stompanato, henchman of Mob boss Mickey Cohen, dead at the hands of the 14-year-old daughter of his squeeze, Lana Turner. Tough luck for Johnny, but a good sign for you: you caught the eye of the guy who took off the Sweater Girl’s sweater nightly. If that doesn’t make you a movie star yourself it puts you in the same firmament as one, doesn’t it? At the very least it makes you seriously hot stuff.
And you’ve got more than looks going for you. You’ve got brains too. You read all the time—Proust, Woolf, Colette, Anthony Powell. And you’re good at school, even if you spend most of your class time doodling Frederick’s of Hollywood models on the back of your notebook. You certainly have no intention of making a right turn on Sunset after graduation, moving up the road to U.C.L.A., in squarer-than-square Westwood.
It’s 1959. You’re a girl, 15 years old. Your parents are bohemians before the category becomes a fashionable one. Your dad, Sol, born in Brooklyn, is first violinist for the Twentieth Century Fox Orchestra. First violinist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic too, and a Fulbright scholar. He once got into a fistfight over the proper way to play the dotted notes in Bach. Your mom, Mae, is an artist. A work of art, as well, so beautiful is she, and charming. Your godfather is Igor Stravinsky. He’s been slipping you glasses of scotch under the table since you turned 13, and his wife, the peerlessly elegant Vera, taught you how to eat caviar. Your house, on the corner of Cheremoya and Chula Vista at the foot of the Hollywood Hills, is always full-to-bursting with your dad’s hip musician friends: Jelly Roll Morton and Stuff Smith, Joseph Szigeti and Marilyn Horne. There are tales of earlier picnics along the L.A. River with Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard, Greta Garbo, Bertrand Russell, and the Huxleys. The two Kenneths, Rexroth and Patchen, perform readings in your living room regularly. But poetry bores you blind, so you talk Lucy Herrmann, wife of movie composer Bernard—Bennie to you—into telling you stories upstairs. Arnold Schoenberg just laughs when you and your sister, Mirandi, get stuck together with bubble gum in the middle of the premiere of his latest piece at the Ojai Music Festival.Now imagine this:
You’re a sophomore at Hollywood High. It’s that dead time between classes and you’re in the girls’ room, smoking one of the 87 cigarettes you share daily with Sally. Sally, who before she even transferred to Hollywood High had been through the wringer at Twentieth Century Fox, signed to a contract and then summarily dropped because she’d bleached her hair an eyeball-scorching shade of platinum the night before she was supposed to report for her first day of work, rendering herself superfluous because, unbeknownst to her, the studio had been planning to make her the next natural-type beauty in the Jean Seberg mold. Sally, who finds mornings so onerous she has to chase 15 milligrams of Dexamyl with four cups of thin coffee just to drag herself to first period. Sally, who is rich and surly and sex-savvy and has recently been taken up by a group of twenty-somethings from her acting class, the Thunderbird Girls you call them, if only in your head, knockouts all, cruising around town in—what else?—Thunderbird convertibles, spending their nights on the Sunset Strip, their weekends in Palm Springs with the ring-a-ding likes of Frank Sinatra. Sally, who is your best friend.
The company you keep is fast, which is O.K. by you since fast, as it so happens, is just your speed. No woof-woof among sex kittens you. Not with your perfect skin and teeth, hair the color of vanilla ice cream, secondary sexual characteristics that are second to none. The year before, when you were 14, you went to a party you weren’t supposed to go to. A right kind of wrong guy—an Adult Male, a big beef dreamboat galoot, just what you’d had in mind when you sneaked out of the house—told you he’d give you a ride home. You jumped at the offer. But when you lost your nerve, confessed your age, he pulled the car over to the side of the road. “Don’t let guys pick you up like this, kid—you might get hurt,” he said, undercutting this gruff bit of fatherly advice by laying a five-alarm kiss on you. He drove off without telling you his name. A few months passed and there was your white knight in black-and-white, on the front page of every paper in town. He’d had a run-in with another under-age girl, only this encounter had ended in penetration: her knife in his gut. Johnny Stompanato, henchman of Mob boss Mickey Cohen, dead at the hands of the 14-year-old daughter of his squeeze, Lana Turner. Tough luck for Johnny, but a good sign for you: you caught the eye of the guy who took off the Sweater Girl’s sweater nightly. If that doesn’t make you a movie star yourself it puts you in the same firmament as one, doesn’t it? At the very least it makes you seriously hot stuff.
And you’ve got more than looks going for you. You’ve got brains too. You read all the time—Proust, Woolf, Colette, Anthony Powell. And you’re good at school, even if you spend most of your class time doodling Frederick’s of Hollywood models on the back of your notebook. You certainly have no intention of making a right turn on Sunset after graduation, moving up the road to U.C.L.A., in squarer-than-square Westwood.
by Lili Anolik, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Image: Julian Wasser
