WHEN IT CAME TO MEASURED ANALYSIS, JILL WAS ON A par with me. She had me cold on the room situation, as far as that went. What she probably didn’t realize is that she had hit on the phrase that best describes my method with women—if it can be called a method. I stumble over them.
One of the reasons I still live in L.A. is because it literally teems with women. One can stumble and fall almost anywhere in L.A. and land on a woman. I’ve done it time and again, and often, if I’m lucky, I even stumble over ladies who haven’t been in town too long. Ladies who have resided here for ten years or so I try not to stumble into—like other flora of the desert, those ladies will have grown thorns.
But when women first get to town the sun and the breeze and the relaxed, undemanding patter of Hollywood talk has a tranquilizing effect. Sometimes this effect lasts three or four years, interrupted only by periods of gnawing, puzzled loneliness. The gnawing and the puzzlement are apt to be especially pronounced if the lady comes here from the East—that’s the American East—due to the level-of-taste factor. During these first years the nice, newly arrived women can be counted on to be extremely companionable, and on the whole I’ve done pretty well with them, thanks to my vulnerability and my obvious helplessness. Few women can resist helpless men: what a focus it gives them for their talents.
With that in mind, I’ve always studiously avoided learning how to do anything more complicated than making drinks. In the very old days I used to try and attract women by demonstrations of superiority, but all that got me was an occasional masochist. It was my beloved wife, Claudia, the serial queen, who convinced me that in the male inferiority is by far the more attractive quality.
I was broadly inferior to Claudia, but she adored me. She was an Olympic swimmer, for one thing. Her performance in the Olympics was overshadowed by Johnny Weissmuller’s, and he went on to overshadow her in pictures too, but she could swing through the vines with the best of them; besides which, she could cook, decorate houses, grow flowers, and do a lot of other things. I couldn’t touch her: not in talent, not in human ability, not even in spirit. By the time we met I had published a couple of thin, affected novels, given up, and was doing hack work around the studios, writing Westerns, jungle movies, serials, shorts, and propaganda pictures. It wasn’t destroying my sensitive, artistic soul, either, because I didn’t have one. I was just lucky enough to have found a craft I liked, at which I was reasonably competent. Claudia talked for a time about my writing a really good novel, but I think it was only because she liked to hope that I might someday grow up.
In the end I did grow up: as she was dying. Up until then it had been unnecessary, maybe even undesirable. I remained her roaring boy, lover, wayward son, whatever.
A year or two after her death, when I grudgingly went on to other ladies, I seldom, if ever, found that I needed to feign inferiority. In most cases, I was inferior. Of course I was smarter than a few of them, but that didn’t help me much. Women know precisely where intelligence fits in the scale of human values. It may occasionally get you a meal, but it won’t get you fucked. There are always more powerful factors at work, such as beauty and ugliness, dependence and independence, greed and need. I’m usually inferior in every visible way to the smart, expensive ladies I keep company with, and yet they continue to waft down upon me, one after another, like discarded garments.
It drives Jill mad. She doesn’t understand what they see in me that they can’t seem to see in their handsome, well-kept husbands.
But then I’ve never been sure that Jill has ever been attracted enough to have any understanding of attraction. She may not realize that passion is usually answering some important question. In the case of myself and women who are seemingly far too good for me, the question it answers is whether there is anything real except beauty and money. At least that’s the question it answers for the ladies. For me the question is more like “What am I going to do without Claudia?” The ladies are only a temporary answer, but if you repeat a temporary answer often enough, it acquires a degree of permanency. And a degree is certainly all I expect.
The fact that these young women, with their trim ankles, high cheekbones, good educations, bright eyes, little bosoms, and expensive clothes, keep coming to my bungalow and often to my bed, despite the fact that I’m old, fat, often drunk, beneath them on the social scale, and in love with a dead woman, only increases Jill’s impatience with her own sex. Their foolishness drives her up the wall, and my willingness to assist them in their obvious folly is a constant bone of contention between us.
Human unreason is Jill’s bête noire, as I often point out. I think sometimes she doesn’t know what heat there is in incongruity. I get a certain mileage out of incongruity, but in fact my success with women—modest as it is—is due to nothing more than a capacity for attention. This capacity is not mysterious, but it is rare, in a man. I like to think it is particularly rare in Los Angeles, but I really don’t know that. It may be just as rare everywhere. Maybe the truth is that only men like myself, who have nothing else to do in life, can afford to pay serious attention to women.
The moment I realized I wasn’t a real writer and thus had no important artistic task to perform, I became a serious ladies’ man—although for twenty-five years I was a ladies’ man with only one lady. I became a kind of Proust of women, with every tit and giggle tucked away in my memory somewhere. Claudia and I met at Republic, when I was writing an episode or two of the Nyoka serials she was in. We had breakfast together at Schwab’s a few times, drove out to Santa Monica once or twice on Sunday, to see the waves, and from beginnings in no way original or even very intense found ourselves in a marriage that grew like a great book, filling twenty-five years with many thousands of elaborate and subtle details. They were not all happy details, of course. Some years were not all that well-written, one might say. Claudia had three affairs, for example, whereas my philandering, during the whole of the marriage, boiled down to a one-night stand in Carson City. But then no idyll is a great book, nor any great marriage an idyll.
I came away from her grave with a lot of memories, and with the ability to pay attention to women—an ability that’s kept me in company ever since. It brought me Jill, for that matter. When she came to work at Warners, not long after her Oscar, she still looked like a girl who wasn’t ready to leave junior high. I had known her slightly for several years, through Tony Maury, but only slightly. We didn’t share the same weaknesses, which is how people usually make friends, in Hollywood or elsewhere.
Once she got to Warners, we soon developed a serious weakness for one another. It started, of course, with me being chivalrous. I kept noticing her in the commissary, a skinny girl with short hair, invariably wearing jeans, sneakers, and a jogger’s sweat shirt. Just as invariably, she would be being pestered by three or four men.
Jill might not vary, but the men did. In my view they constituted a potpourri of the worst assholes on the lot, an eclectic mixture of would-be studs. Socially, they pretty well covered the spectrum, from grips and prop men and boom operators all the way up to perhaps the second level of executives. In fact, the first time I met Preston Sibley III he was pestering Jill, and him fresh off the plane from Locust Valley.
I took in the situation at a glance—as they used to say in the pulps—and the situation was that a lot of horses’ asses were pestering the one creature in the world that they should have known they were not equipped to deal with: an intelligent woman. When pressed, I can be as impatient with my sex as Jill is with hers. It was obvious that none of the pesterers would have had the faintest idea what to do with her if they could have attracted her, but, perversely, they kept right at it, as if she were the only woman on the lot worth their time.
In those days she was far too shy and polite just to tell them to fuck off—she still is, as far as that goes—so her lunch hours at Warners consisted mostly of parrying unwanted sexual thrusts. It seemed to me to be a boring way to spend lunch, so I presumed on our mutual friendship with the infamous Tony Maury and began inserting myself at her table. Then I would either tell loud, labyrinthine stories about the old days, or launch into a little lecture about the latest serious book I had read reviews of—The Origins of Totalitarianism, perhaps—all this to the great annoyance of the would-be cocksmen.
To my surprise, Jill enjoyed my stories. She liked hearing about all those happy, hard-drinking boys I used to know, the fellows who would have made Hollywood great if they could have. More surprisingly, she enjoyed my little lectures too. Half the time she even went and read the damn books, and then came back and put me to shame, or at least forced me to bullshit rather skillfully. She was curious about everything, but particularly curious about people. Why did they do the things they did?
She seemed to think I might know, and in all likelihood I encouraged her to think so. There’s nothing more tonic to an aging man than a bright, gray-eyed student who appears to be completely taken in by whatever false wisdom or learned nonsense he may feel like babbling.
This time it worked out well, though. By the time Jill realized that I was an old fraud, rather than Socrates, she loved me anyway and it didn’t matter. Besides, the cocksmen soon decided that the prospect of fucking her wasn’t worth having to listen to me—particularly since it was a remote prospect at best. In no time at all we had a table to ourselves, and I guess we still do.
“Remember our days at Warners?” I said, smiling.
“Sure,” Jill said. “You drove off all my would-be boyfriends with your pontificating. Who knows what I missed because of you? I might have managed to want one of them, eventually.”
“You had true respect for me in those days,” I said. “You thought I knew everything about life.”
“Yes,” she said, shaking her head quickly, with some force. It was an old mannerism, that headshake, and meant that she was utterly convinced about something—as if fate were a long flight of stairs down which she could see to the very bottom. Meanwhile, she put her hand over her coffee cup, to discourage the lurking Oriental.
“Is that a floating yes?” I asked. “Are you affirming life, like Molly Bloom?”
“Yes, you do know everything about life,” she said. “You just won’t tell me very much at a time. It’s your hook. If you told me everything you know, then I wouldn’t need you any more, and I might go off and leave you. Then you’d be stuck with all your little friends. How would that be?”
“Well, I wouldn’t have to think so hard at this hour on Sundays,” I said. “This is a freakish conversation. Why can’t we just talk about deals and box office, like normal people?”
“Let’s go,” she said. “I’m tired of guarding a coffee cup.”
I reached for the check, but she was quicker. “I’m the one that’s going to be rich,” she said. “You can tip.”
She was at the cash register, waiting none too patiently, when I finally unwedged myself from what had been our booth.