I Used to Be Charming Read online

  In writing all these beautiful interesting things, initially meant for ephemeral mediums like alternative weeklies printed on rapidly yellowing newsprint and produced in a “transitory spirit”—not unlike the wildflowers that pop up on the sides of L.A. freeways in spring—Babitz paradoxically created a long-lasting canon of work. Impermanence should be freeing, not frightening, and Babitz writes like someone who lives life to its limits. There are no experiences in moderation for her, because what use is life if you’re not going to try everything on the table? Los Angeles has always been the bleeding edge of the country, a place onto which people project everything bad about culture—much like women, as it happens. Babitz notes that L.A. is the only harbor city in history to start inland and grow west to the sea. To read Eve Babitz is to feel like her passenger, cruising down long Hollywood streets through a painted-backdrop sunset toward eternal waves.

  —MOLLY LAMBERT

  I USED TO BE CHARMING

  Dedication

  To Mae and Sol Babitz, always

  Acknowledgments

  To Mirandi Babitz, for my reappearance and for this book and for everything.

  To Lili Anolik for her love, her Vanity Fair piece, and for Hollywood’s Eve.

  To Erica Spellman Silverman for coming back into my life as my agent, and to the whole team at Trident Media Group who worked so hard on all my books, I can’t thank you enough.

  To Sara Kramer at NYRB Classics because this book is really her book; and to all the editors and publishers throughout the years, who believed in my work, especially Joie Davidow and Susan LaTempa.

  To all my fans, new and old. I am so glad to have found an audience to dance with.

  ALL THIS AND THE GODFATHER TOO

  Francis Ford Coppola and His World

  1. THE BALMY SUMMER EVENING DANCE

  “They’re shooting the party scene outside at night,” I was told. “Bring mittens and wool socks, and wear a fur coat if you have one.”

  Fred Roos took over the phone and said, “You’ll love it here. It’s a chance to get away from Tana’s.”

  I bought some socks and flew to Reno.

  •

  “Thirty degrees and that wind, coming off the lake like a mother! And them working till four in the morning! Boy, I don’t know how they do it!” The cab driver who picked me up at the airport had his own thoughts about the movie. He asked, “What’ll you be doing up here?”

  “Watching,” I said, and made him pull over so I could buy a fifth of tequila to be on the safe side because Fred Roos and other working movie people often forget to drink.

  “Washing?” the guy asked, puzzled, as he drove through groves of shimmering aspens turned golden for the fall.

  “No, watching . . . I’m sort of a writer,” I replied.

  The sun was setting by the time we’d driven through Reno; soon we were almost to Tahoe City, where a large and carefully assembled cast and crew were making their first attempts to shoot a movie called The Godfather, Part II. Al Pacino was now a star. Francis Ford Coppola had 6 percent of the first Godfather, which seemed in danger of becoming the biggest movie success the world has ever known. Fred Roos, who had once been a casting director, was now the coproducer (with Gray Frederickson).

  Suddenly, the lake appeared. It was a mirror of the sky, pinkish from the sunset; reflections of pine trees rippled in the breeze.

  The location was a cluster of little wooden houses, a retired motel with strange English countryside pretensions. Trees grew all around and a guard waited by the narrow road with orders not to let in anybody who wasn’t supposed to be there.

  It was beginning to get chilly.

  Fred Roos, from his office in one of the bigger little houses of the compound, offered to try to find me some long underwear. I was apparently about to face a frozen evening—when I could have been at Tana’s, The Bar Where We All Go to Pick Each Other Up, the Italian restaurant where I once saw Al Pacino and the very place I’d caught Fred’s eye across a crowded room one night a few months before and we’d been introduced. Tana’s was always warm and electric.

  The electricity at Lake Tahoe was provided by a loud generator that chugged away through the night, scaring animals. It provided power not only for the filming, but for the real focal point of the evening—the Mets/Oakland game.

  By nightfall the first shots were being readied.

  The extras were dressed in clothes suitable for a balmy summer evening; between takes they rushed into giant khaki army coats and boots. Long underwear was stuffed under delicate gowns and there were people about whose only function was to tear the coat from a star’s back the instant the cameras went on and to put the coat back on the instant the camera stopped.

  •

  “Feel this,” said Francis Ford Coppola, clad in a thick bunch of clothing and wearing a ridiculous-looking woolen hat that sloped over to one side at the top. “Feel in here.”

  He indicated his pocket. I felt, and out came a red velvet box that looked like something that diamonds from Tiffany’s might come from.

  “For me!” I said. It was so soon!

  “Just feel it,” he said. And I did and it was hot. The gold lettering on the top, I noticed then, did not say “Tiffany.” It said “Hand Warmer.” Inside was a burning coal.

  “People’s mothers used to send those things to guys in Korea so they wouldn’t freeze,” Fred Roos said.

  “Why, Fred, I didn’t know you were in Korea,” someone said. Fred Roos looks like he’s about twelve, but for his slightly graying sideburns.

  “There were guys stationed in Korea after the war, you know,” Fred said.

  And then Francis Ford Coppola, with gargantuan patience, began to apply himself to the shooting of the film.

  I don’t suppose I will ever really understand Francis. My main feeling about him, which gets stronger and stronger as time goes by, is simply abject belief in his greatness. I want to be on his side.

  If you read pieces about Francis, you will notice that anyone who writes about him, from Time and Newsweek to The New Yorker or even to The Esoteric Film Quarterly for the Finest Minds, all writers (except Joyce Haber), are spellbound by him.

  He talks about schemes to create the greatest shows on earth, simultaneously superimposing upon them the subtlest artistic inspirations. And who, after all, is going to refuse that offer?

  On Francis’s side are Righteousness and Truth, Pure Untainted Visions of Ancient Glory and Modern Goodness. On the other side are the Capitalist George Grosz Money Masturbators, amassing Power in secret vaults.

  You refuse this offer, you say, and you’re sure Francis isn’t all that great and he’s just like the rest of them and besides you can’t be bothered with adolescent crushes? I challenge you to talk to Francis for fifteen minutes (or for four days) and find a gap.

  Mistakes he makes, flaws he’s got. But he’s only thirty-six and he’s still just a beginner.

  2. THE ONE-HOUR MISUNDERSTANDING

  Pacino and Coppola fought in Las Vegas and people quaked in their boots.

  “He . . .” Pacino began. “Look, why the hell does it take so long to shoot a scene? Lumet shot Serpico in eighteen days! And I go up to Francis, I’ve got a problem I want to talk to him about . . . So what does he do? He tells me his problems. What do I want to hear his problems for? He’s the director!”

  Francis is strange about actors. He believes in them. He takes a lot of trouble to cast them, and then he lets go. He doesn’t try to improve them. He hardly even says “Good” after a shot that’s a take; he just goes on to the next shot.

  He once told me that he was terrified when he learned that Brando would actually be in the original Godfather movie. Imagine trying to tell someone like that how to act. Things became stranger still when Brando came up to him and said, “Now, look. I’ll tell you how I like to be directed. You just tell me ‘Louder, softer, madder, kindlier’. . . You just tell me. You want me to look a certain way? You tell me. You want me t
o look up? Down? I’ll do anything you say.”

  “And he did,” Coppola added with a lingering sense of amazement. “He did anything.”

  •

  If there is anything an actor hates more than a director who won’t let him alone, it’s a director who trusts him to such an extent that he forgets about him entirely. The actor’s art is the art of physical presence. His body, his voice, his eyes, and his inner spirit are leased to a film for the time it takes to shoot.

  Of course, films are a lot more than actors. There is the camera, for example, which can express things the actor is thereby absolved from—distance, light, a certain kind of drama. There are sets, with their minute detail. There is the Studio, which wonders why everything has to cost so much and why one of the actors was seen out with a certain person who will tarnish everyone’s image.

  Everybody knows that Francis Ford Coppola is brilliant. And it is not just the brilliance of casting, script, or camerawork. It is the brilliance of stamina.

  And because everyone knows how brilliant he is, the actors hold on, trusting that his trust in them is part of his brilliance. But for a person whose art is his body it’s frightening to be trusted so much.

  What if you’re a New York actor like Al Pacino, who’s used to having friends and lovers right around the corner, used to having little playhouses where he can watch colleagues working. All of a sudden, out you step onto the lot at Paramount where huge empty soundstages testify to the glory that once was Hollywood—probably the glory that made you become an actor in the first place.

  You live in a hotel and they’ve given you a chauffeured car and out you step into the middle of an empty day. Should you read? But you can’t concentrate on books. You’re supposed to be thinking about your body and soul. Maybe you should go back and watch the shooting, but it’s so hemmed in by the director’s fastidious perfectionism that the thread gets lost and you, along with the extras, are overwhelmed by boredom.

  You could go drink, but . . . And you would go eat except that working on a full stomach, as you know from past experience, is wrong. You decide you hate Hollywood and if you ever get out of this picture alive, you’ll only do plays on the East Coast, even if they’re performed in hovels, or in Maine. You’ll never come back here to this damned fucking wasteland, even for brilliant fucking Francis Ford Coppola.

  Or you could talk to girls. But the girls out here are different. They’re not people, they don’t know . . . They’re too pretty. Too crazy. They don’t do anything except be tall and drive fast cars. You, yourself, don’t drive. You’ve learned from past experience that you are not to be trusted at the wheel.

  You met a girl the other day who is a health-food freak. She wore no makeup or underclothes and she was gorgeous. She gave you some ginseng root and told you if you chewed on it, you’d feel better.

  The camera pans away from you as you stand in the middle of the crisp, clear, empty afternoon, chewing on a distasteful, tough root, waiting to feel better. It’s something to do until 3 p.m.

  You are one of the chosen. Francis has chosen you and Francis is brilliant. You remember that, bear that in mind, because sometime, somehow, Francis will come forth with a dark golden thing of beauty. Just like in the movies. And everyone will say, What wonderful actors! Just like in the movies.

  •

  “Listen, babes,” he growls, alternating between a glass of ginger ale and a glass of Olympia beer. “If there’s anything I know, it’s never try to tell anyone how much pain you’re in . . . And never expect anyone to answer any question.”

  Or at least never expect Michael Gazzo to answer any question. Because he starts in the middle of any given topic of conversation, and it’s like you’ve missed the first act. But he will tell you about the pain, very elaborately and very well. He is not unable, like most actors are, to find the words to exquisitely describe the exact quality of the pain, because Gazzo is also a dealer in words. He wrote A Hatful of Rain, they told me, and he told me that he only acts to support his writing, his three children, his dog, and his wife.

  His wife watches carefully to see that he doesn’t run out of beer, that his ashtray is empty, that there are matches . . . They eloped twenty-nine years ago to Point Pleasure, New Jersey, when she was working in an insurance office and he was a machinist. It is impossible to imagine what Michael Gazzo looked like twenty-nine years ago, he looks so himself now—so baleful. They live in a brownstone on Forty-Fourth Street, which they own—a whole house in the middle of the theater district. He has an acting workshop there and it is there that he writes. He’s thinking of moving to Los Angeles, he says, because “the theater is sociologically dead.” All that’s left are movies, and movies treat actors like shit, he repeats, over and over. “The studios have everything ass backwards. Listen, babes, all you have is the script, the director, and the actor, and anyone else is full of shit . . .”

  “I don’t give a shit if Francis hears this or not,” Gazzo says occasionally. “Francis is a . . . a brilliant man. But Francis is not an actor.”

  (“Gazzo’s probably going to get an Academy Award for this,” they say on the soundstage, and slowly shake their heads.)

  •

  The Lost Hour occurred on Friday, November 30, 1973, at Paramount Studios on stage #27 during the Senate Investigating Committee scene.

  Extras dressed in painful clothes comprised the audience, the press, and the FBI men, and, between takes, they all spoke mostly about the shoes that the women had to wear. “How can you walk in those things?” The shoes had narrow high heels and pointy toes, and were killers. I was one of the extras, hired by Fred Roos on a “waiver” to impersonate a member of the press. Waivers are for people who are not professional extras.

  The professional extras are used to being bored beyond words. They are used to hardship, temperamental stars and directors, interminable waiting, and waking up at 5 a.m. The rest of us, and about one-third of the courtroom was “us,” were on waivers. We weren’t used to it at all.

  The first day, Thursday, I had to get there at 7 a.m. and the sky was black outside at six when I heard the alarm. By eight I was wearing the ghastly clothes that they wore in 1958, had on the hideous red lipstick and the stupid black line on the top of my eyelids, and was shifting my feet. But at least I got to sit down the whole time, not lean against the back wall like some of the poor women.

  Over in one corner, I saw one nondescript extra who looked like Al Pacino’s brother’s friend. Someone told me later that he was Robert De Niro.

  It was not until 10:30 that we moved into the courtroom. Why had I had to wake up at six if they weren’t going to do anything until 10:30? I tried not to think about it. I tried to be cheerful and optimistic.

  My second day as an extra was Friday, and that was the day of the Lost Hour.

  Michael Gazzo plays a character called Pentangeli in The Godfather, Part II. He is the star witness, an ex-mobster turning state’s evidence. He’s going to tell all about the Corleone family and hopefully send Michael (Al Pacino) to jail.

  But most of the extras didn’t know this. We were just told to act excited when the man was shown into the courtroom.

  The cameras rolled. Suddenly, a presence entered—a flamboyant, smiling, huge presence. Gazzo was led to his seat and he ran through the scene with so much fire that even the girls pinched into their shoes against the back wall, sixty feet away, took notice. It was like an injection of pure show business.

  Then he ran through the scene again. It was a complicated dance, hard to block, with photographers flashing, Gazzo smiling, cigars lit, questions asked . . .

  Then we broke for lunch, and the extras grumbled because we only got forty-five minutes, which meant that we couldn’t dash out to Nickodell’s for anything decent, but had to eat off the truck—cottage cheese and V8 juice and dumb sandwiches.

  I had seen the rushes of one of Gazzo’s earlier scenes, a dinner party that had to be relit and shot from six different angles so that
the reactions of each of the diners could be recorded. Throughout the shooting, Gazzo was drinking wine. Finally, in the last take, Diane Keaton (who was playing Pacino’s wife) looked into the camera and said, “I hope everyone’s having a good time. I know I certainly am.” Gazzo’s chin was nearly on the table.

  So when lunch came, I had it in the back of my mind that even though they weren’t letting the extras get anything decent to eat, they would, in the interest of the scene, watch Gazzo closely. If he could get drunk in front of the cameras, just think what he could do alone in forty-five minutes.

  When we regrouped, all was well. Everyone found his place and we waited for the scene to begin. Gazzo, this time, was equally a presence. But he slurred his words, and there were these . . . pauses.

  Francis called to his henchman, Newt. (Newt has a black eye patch and an invisible whip, and he told us to be quiet 127 times in my two days as an extra.) “All right,” he said to him. “Have everyone break for an hour.”

  And that was the Lost Hour.

  The professional extras regarded this as a splendid opportunity to get on with their needlepoint and to worry about whether they’d be back on Monday.

  Everyone, somehow, knew that it was because of Gazzo.

  But how, I wondered, do you fix these things in one hour? How do they do that in the movie business? They send for an ambulance, a nurse with an alligator bag, and plenty of oxygen, food, and Coca-Cola. That’s how. He was all better in an hour and they shot from there until 9:30 p.m. But he wasn’t the same as when he’d first come in. He was fine, but he wasn’t the same.