MY HOTEL IN Hollywood became, for a time, the Chateau Marmont. Somebody told me writers stayed there, and once I believed them. At least one other writer stayed there, Renata Adler, who wrote about it in A Year in the Dark.
I had trouble with the Chateau’s labyrinthine basement and parking garage, which presented one with a maze of pillars. During my time at the Chateau if there were other writers staying there, they must have been invisible, because I never saw a one.
My first Hollywood novel, Somebody’s Darling, came to me as a small gift from the gods. I was leaving Peter’s office at Columbia when I heard what sounded like a slap; then a young woman in a T-shirt burst out of the doorway right beside me. She was in tears, copious tears.
“Come back, you no-talent bitch,” a voice said, from inside the door. The man who had just slapped the young woman stuck his head out, saw me—I was momentarily frozen in place—then he shut the door and I never saw either the man or the young woman again. But I used her in All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers as a fairly minor character, just as I had used Aurora Greenway—using her in Terms, as well as the ghastly Evening Star.
I knew, as I was writing All My Friends, that I would come back to the young woman who had been slapped. Her name became Jill Peel. And I did use her, in Somebody’s Darling, in which book I went back to the three-voice method of Leaving Cheyenne: I allowed three major characters in the book to tell the story as they saw it, in their own voices.
By the time of Somebody’s Darling I had been working in Hollywood nearly twenty years and I still didn’t know enough about the town to write a wholly convincing book about it. The book has its moments, but these are scattered; the recollections of the old screenwriter Joe Percy are my favorite parts, now that I too, like Joe, have become an old screenwriter.
My other Hollywood novel, Loop Group, though wholly ignored, contains a far better picture of what one might call working-girl Hollywood, about which, by gosh and by golly, I finally began to learn a few things.
On the other hand, Somebody’s Darling brought a permanent friend, the incandescently lovely Diane Keaton, into my life. She and I started working on this friendship in 1980 and it has, over time, borne a rich fruit. I am also permanent friends with her sister, Dorrie Hall, dealer in many interesting objets, mainly Western.
What we didn’t do, along the way, was get Somebody’s Darling filmed. The story, like Loop Group, had the misfortune of being about Hollywood, and it’s a Hollywood truism that movies about Hollywood never make money.
Probably Hollywood exists to create illusions, not dispel them, which even a low-wattage story such as Somebody’s Darling might tend to do. The dream factory just can’t afford to dream about itself.
Diane Keaton didn’t get to play Jill Peel, or Emma in Terms of Endearment, or (so far) Maggie in Loop Group, but I’m still hoping to tempt her with the role of K. K. Slater in Rhino Ranch. Why? K.K. is a billionairess, and I’m certain that Diane would not be averse to having billions of dollars, even if it was play money.