Tagalong

A mostly-true fable about an almost-real Beverly Hills party

The Boone house on the corner of Beverly Drive and Sunset Boulevard is the spitting image of Ozzie and Harriet's house on TV, but bigger. Striking in its spaciousness, the colonial home on the coveted three acre lot is endowed with a drive-through breezeway, a basketball half-court and a huge backyard, and there’s an industrial strength swing-set-and-slide structure made of steel, reaching 15 ft. vertically. At the back of the property there is a 30 ft long concrete pool with a diving board and pool house, and to the side, a public-park-sized side yard, dotted with perfectly symmetrical orange trees. This afternoon, this pristine side yard teems with A, B and C type celebrities, the latter group reminiscent of Barnum & Bailey characters with no tent to justify a curious circus motif.

An orphanage-focused charity event significant enough to be peppered with paparazzi, this quintessential Hollywood party organically creates colorful human-shaped vignettes staged with costuming and make-up, many groupings worthy of a Vogue cover, circa 1963, and the movie-star host (my father) directs traffic, gently guiding his strikingly-tan wife, hair frosted and teased with matching pink-frosted lipstick (my mother), through a hive of peculiar people.

Batman and Robin (Adam West and Burt Ward) arrive in costume, gliding by slowly from the front porch to the catering table in the front driveway, grinning under their masks, and taunting photographers seeking an A list payout. Famous for his role as a superhero’s sidekick, Robin is smaller-than-expected, yet oddly sexy in his bright yellow collar-and-cape and his black leather gloves, and Batman remains appropriately mysterious, fully-masked and therefore, barely visible, partly due to his flat affect.

Crooners Andy Williams and Perry Como make separate obligatory appearances, but don’t linger, and Ricky and Kristin Nelson stop traffic, showing up late to banter in front of the camera with those-less-famous, which would be anyone in attendance in the early sixties.

Iconic in star-like imagery, an unknown amazonian woman with slicked-back-and-teased, platinum blond hair balances on pencil-thin-heeled, patent leather boots, clothed neck-to-boot in a white, patent leather jumpsuit, a striking tableau almost completely overshadowed by the honest to god, medium-sized tiger she firmly restrains in her right hand. The anonymous woman walks the catwalk, assuming the sea of stars, starlets and nobodies will open up a path for her, as if it is her importance that wields influence, rather than the beast walking beside her.

Sprinkled throughout the human eye-candy, perennially posing for no particular reason, are the rank and file looky-loos, autograph seekers, church ladies and average Joes, the invisibles, in attendance because of a donation to the cause, or a several-degrees-of-separation relationship that eeked out a ticket to the show. The contrast is obvious, uncomfortable. The dazzling people, shining, but leaning dangerously over the harsh precipice of their tenuous celebrity, stand juxtaposed against all of the rest, the threateningly average folk awkwardly seeking proximity to fame, or even just a close-up look at the circus.

My seven year old self knows that she belongs in the latter classification, the unglamorous and the unskilled. The gossamer quality of transient fame is disorienting, and I take it in, distantly disturbed by the otherness I feel, the imposing space between the luminous and the lackluster. I’m not special. A tagalong here, I’m acting as if I could actually own this hallowed Hollywood ground beneath my feet, but I’m only pretending that I blend in with the exquisite and the exceptional. And in this context, acting-as-if carries with it a virus, an illusion of separateness that clouds my self-awareness and self-esteem; for decades, I will believe I am an impostor, accepting the false premise that to succeed or achieve, I will need to become a better pretender, or simply follow along behind the others rather than blaze my own trail.

(“Tagalong” is an excerpt from a larger piece of work, Swimming with Gods and Mermaids.)