chapter twenty-seven

SEARCHING FOR A CESSNA

October 1958

 

On a warm fall day in my first year at Hollywood High, a month or so into the semester, my father picked me up from school right after lunch. The night before, he’d told me he needed my help with a case he was working on . . . did I mind missing my last classes?

He needed my help? This was puzzling. My father was an IRS special agent whose caseload consisted primarily of the so-called L.A. Jewish mafia, Mickey Cohen and friends. How could he need my help? He explained that he was looking for a Cessna airplane that was probably parked at one of the general aviation airports in the L.A. area. The airplane was owned by a guy who owed the government thousands of dollars (I assume millions in today’s dollars). The goal was to take possession of it—one of the ways the government got what it was owed.

In fact, the car my father was driving that day, the company car as it were, was a late-model Thunderbird. When they seized expensive cars in those days, they didn’t auction them off, they used them for IRS business. My father, who skewed tweedy and looked more like an academic than a special agent for anything, never looked quite right driving Thunderbirds, Coupe de Villes, or Corvettes, the crop of cars they had seized that year. He said the practice saved money. Maybe so but it must have been a public relations problem because I’m pretty sure they stopped doing it by the time my father retired in 1966.

He needed my help, he said, because he was in a hurry. If the guy got wind of the IRS search, he’d hide the plane. “If you come with me we can cover twice the territory in half the time.” I remained puzzled. Surely they had staff to enlist. Maybe he thought I wanted to go into law enforcement when I finished school. I had recently asked if he would come to career day at the school to talk about his work. Whatever the reason, there was nothing about his proposal I didn’t like. My dad was a G-man; I’d be a G-man’s assistant! I just hoped the kids filing out of class that day saw me riding down Highland Avenue with my father in a red Thunderbird convertible.

For a long time, I thought it was weird that my father, who was a revolutionary at heart, a Trotskyite with a small t, worked for the government. It was only later that it made sense to me. My father believed in publically funded services and institutions—quality schools, government-supported medical care, sturdy, well-funded safety nets—and hence, he believed that people should pay taxes. He was at a high enough pay grade to entitle him to go after the big tax evaders, not waiters or hairdressers who failed to report tips.

The IRS might not have agreed that his Marxist principles were consistent with government work (this was, after all, the era of red baiting, blacklisting, and loyalty oaths), but he once told me he wasn’t a joiner so was never a member of any organization that Uncle Sam deemed seditious. Besides, he detested the American Communist Party, a group he referred to as Stalinists, and blamed Communists for various crimes and misdemeanors, from union busting in the United States to the defeat of the Republicans who’d fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War.

We took Olympic Boulevard through the heart of the still-inchoate Century City, cutting over to the Santa Monica Municipal Airport before Olympic reached the beach. When we got out of the car, he showed me a color photo of the Cessna, a red and white airplane with the wings on top. I had never taken much notice of small airplanes before. This one was beautiful. I was already loving the detective work.

“I guess we need to split up,” I said, remembering his reason for wanting me along. “We can’t,” he said, shaking his head. “I forgot that I only have one photo so we’ll have to stick together.” Fishy.

We walked down the first aisle. I had always been a little afraid of airplanes, but lined up that day they looked innocent, safe, tethered like big docile land animals. In the second row, there was a guy polishing the wing of a biplane the color of a yellow rain slicker, the kind I’d seen in World War II movies. My father introduced himself to the man and showed him the photo. The guy whistled. “That’s a beauty.”

“Have you seen it here?”

“No,” the man said, shaking his head. “I would have remembered it.”

As we walked away, I asked my father why he didn’t show him his badge. I’d been disappointed. “Special agents don’t usually bring their daughters along on investigations,” he said, putting his arm around me.

We walked down two more aisles. There were Cessnas but not the one we were looking for. By that time, the heat of the day had been absorbed by the tarmac and heat waves were pulsating up from the blacktop. “There’s a snack bar inside. Let’s go get something to drink.”

We sat at the fountain in the air-conditioned café. My father ordered me an all around chocolate malt (chocolate milk and chocolate ice cream), a drink he had introduced me to as a little girl. As I sucked the thick milky mixture through the straw, he said, “You have an important decision to make. I want us to talk about it.”

I assumed he was referring to the decision about which social club to join—two had accepted me.

“I’ve already made that decision,” I said. “I like the Gammas.”

“That’s not exactly what I’m talking about. Have you considered not joining any club?”

“Not really,” I said. “I think I want to be in a club.” I was dissembling. There was no “think” about it. I had no doubts. As soon as I got to high school, scoped out the scene, as soon as I’d received my first invitation to a Coke session—the first step in rushing—I’d made that decision.

Later, I wondered why he hadn’t delivered this lecture when I was first rushed. Maybe my parents didn’t think I’d get in so why stir the pot for nothing?

He didn’t say anything right away and then asked if I remembered Polly, my best friend in grammar school. “Of course I remember her.”

“Do you remember what happened to her?”

“Did something happen to her?” I said, alarmed. So this was what this much-needed “help” was about. He didn’t need my help on a case, he needed to tell me my friend was dead. We had been best friends when we were younger but had grown apart when we went to different high schools. I went to Hollywood High; she went to John Marshall. There were gangs at Marshall. Though it was in our district, my mother didn’t want me to go there because she had so many foster kids on her caseload who attended. She never said it, but I think she was worried that I wouldn’t be safe there.

“No, sweetheart,” he said, patting the top of my head. “I’m sure she’s fine. I’m talking about what happened to her when you were kids.” When we were in the third grade, a vicious little twerp named Jimmy started teasing her about being biracial. Her father was Chinese and her mother was Caucasian. He didn’t know the difference between Chinese and Japanese so kept referring to her “Jap” father and white mother. (There was still intense hatred of the Japanese in California, a leftover from WWII.) Every day at lunch this kid with a group of his creepy friends would taunt her. Sometimes Jimmy would yank her black silky hair and ask her why her hair wasn’t half white. Or he’d pull down the side of one of his eyes to simulate the epicanthic fold and ask why she didn’t have one round eye and one slanted.

Polly would cry and I would stand helplessly by, screaming names at him. It was the first time I remember feeling pure hatred. He had a group of boys supporting him. We had no one—girls or boys. I don’t know how long we put up with it, but he started getting more aggressive. One day, he pushed her and knocked her down. That night I told my parents. My mother called the principal, who called Jimmy and his parents into her office. He stopped teasing Polly overtly but whenever he could catch her eye without the teacher noticing, he’d pull a menacing face.

“Daddy, Jimmy wasn’t in a club,” I said. He laughed but then explained that not accepting people who are different originates from the same mind-set. It’s all about making some people feel special while making sure everyone else feels left out. The clubs are worse, he said, because they make it official. He asked me how many Asians were in the club. How many Mexicans? How many Negroes? I lied and said I didn’t know. I did know and so did he. There were none. He wasn’t finished with the lesson of the day.

“Do you remember how you felt when you saw those signs in New Orleans?” He was referring to our stop in New Orleans on our way back from Europe in 1956. It was one year after Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Nothing had yet changed in Louisiana. The signs said WHITES ONLY and COLORED at the drinking fountains, the bathrooms, and in the train station. I nodded. I remembered having a stomachache the whole time we were there. “Do you really want to be a part of a system that excludes people?”

My parents had told my brother and me to ignore the signs. No one seemed to notice when we drank at the colored fountain and sat in the colored section. I was surprised and maybe a little disappointed that our efforts at solidarity passed unnoticed.

His little guided tour down memory lane changed nothing. At that point in my life, I wanted to be part of a system that excluded people as long as I wasn’t the one being excluded.

In junior high I wasn’t exactly a misfit; my identity wasn’t even that defined. I was a nobody. At twelve years old I was five-foot-seven, towering over everyone, in particular the boys. I skipped a grade in elementary school and I was convinced, though no one said it, that I was advanced because I was tall. Even then, though I was a year younger than everyone else in my class, I was still the tallest.

The first dance I attended, I was the girl for whom the term “wallflower” was invented. I stood against the gym wall while the boys walked by, assessing and quickly rejecting what was on offer. I’m sure there were other girls not being asked to dance, but it didn’t feel that way. I only remember the humiliation of standing there alone. I had come to the dance with a friend with big bouncy curls and big bouncy breasts. She danced every dance. After the dance, a group of boys who were hot on her trail followed us out the door. They wanted us, rather her, to hang out behind the gym with them to smoke and who knows what. By that time I had somehow found the gumption to resist.

“We can’t,” I said firmly. “We have to go.”

The boys started pressuring my friend. She shrugged. “If she won’t stay, I can’t stay. We came together.” So they turned to lobby me. One of them finally said, “Look, if you stay, I’ll kiss you.” His tone and the look on his face was not of revulsion; it was the look of a martyr! Maybe I hadn’t had the self-respect or wherewithal to leave the gym during the cattle call, but I did have enough to tell my friend I was leaving with or without her and I did. The boy who had so magnanimously offered to kiss me said to my friend, “You don’t need her, my brother will take you home.” They walked to the back of the gym, and I called my mother to come get me.

When I got in the car she asked if I’d had a good time. I said yes but my body language must have said otherwise. The next day, my parents announced that they had decided I was too young to go to dances. “I’m not too young,” I said, but that was as vehement as I got. I was relieved. So relieved.

Because I no longer had to endure dances, and because I’d found a best friend (she also had big bouncy breasts but she was fiercely loyal), I existed below the radar. Popularity didn’t matter. Or so I told myself.

Something changed the summer before high school. I don’t know what it was but I was no longer booby prize material. At Hollywood High I was rushed by a few of the social clubs and accepted by two—one of which was the one I wanted to get into: Gamma Rho.

It’s hard to exaggerate the outsized part these junior sororities played in the social scene at Hollywood High. Eve Babitz, in her book Eve’s Hollywood, wrote that in that era, she so feared being excluded from the social clubs at Hollywood High that she avoided the whole scene by going to a school out of her district and a long bus ride away. “In Hollywood High School you were at the mercy of your cunty peers who whispered and squealed and giggled and screamed about who was being rushed by what sorority. Even today I am nearly heartbroken not to be invited to something, so you can imagine how the prospect of sororities looked to me at the age of fourteen when I had no control over my sanity.”

Gamma Rho was one of three in the top tier, an unspoken designation that I suppose was based on their selectivity. Gammas were known for being wholesome, preppie, and prudish. Our club jacket was a blue blazer. The other clubs had boys’ baseball jackets. The other two in the top tier were the Deltas, beautiful, glamorous, smokers, drinkers; and the Lambdas, just as wholesome as Gammas but maybe less prudish, more athletic. Eve Babitz, who subsequently transferred to Hollywood High after all, wrote at some length in Rolling Stone about the beautiful girls of Hollywood High, claiming that they were not only beautiful but sophisticated. They were so sophisticated, in fact, that they were “running off to Rome with older men—directors, producers, actors.” All I can say is maybe that applied to a Delta or two (Melody did run off with a big movie star but it was years later), but no one I knew either in or out of Gammas was running off to Rome with anybody. Officially anyway, the Gammas had a lock on their chastity until their wedding nights.

My dad and I finished our drinks and returned to the search. He continued his lecture. He said the clubs were based on the Greek system in colleges and universities. Fraternities and sororities, in addition to being intellectually benighted and morally corrupt, were guilty of racism and anti-Semitism. “And they’re closed off from other influences. By the way,” he said, “just out of curiosity, does the club know that you had a Jewish grandmother?”

I shrugged. “They wouldn’t care.”

“You’re sure? According to Jewish law, you’re one hundred percent Jewish because you inherit your Jewishness from your mother.”

I laughed. “Daddy, you’re making too much out of this whole thing. Kids don’t care about these things. The club is just for having fun. For eating lunch together. Having parties. And doing volunteer work. The Gammas help blind kids.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, “we’re not going to forbid you to join.” He said they simply wanted me to understand the ramifications of the decision. I would be sacrificing values he knew I had, and he wanted me to consider my decision carefully. I said I would but I didn’t. Not for a second.

“If you decide to join, you might end up regretting it one day.” He was right but for reasons I don’t believe even he predicted.

Years later, I thought about this: My brother attended Hollywood High four years before I did. He was in a club at a time when social clubs were no less discriminating. My father never gave him the lecture about joining. I’ve never known what to make of that.

We never did find the Cessna. Was there a Cessna?