HOLLYWOOD
CHAPTER 11
I always depend on the kindness of women. In Los Angeles, my half sister Carol and I rent a two-bedroom bungalow in a run-down motel on Sunset. The wrong end of Sunset, far away from the Strip.
Carol is doing wigs, huge creations that turn heads. She already knows everybody in town. She is good friends with Tammi Terrell, the singer. A Philly girl, not even twenty when I meet her, she’s a slip of a thing with a big childlike eyes and a bigger voice.
Tammi makes her first record when she is sixteen years old. She keeps on getting “discovered,” first by James Brown and then, later on, by Berry Gordy, Jr., who pairs her in a series of duets with Marvin Gaye doing Ashford & Simpson songs. When I meet her, she has only a few years to live. She’ll be dead from a brain tumor by the end of the decade.
At the bungalow, she’s just Tammi, just another one of Carol’s friends. Our place is a clearinghouse for black acts passing through Hollywood. They all crash with us. I remember coming in late one night and finding Gladys Knight’s brother and cousins snoring on the floor of our living room.
Bubba Knight and cousins Langston George, Ed Patten, and Bill Guest are the Pips, Gladys’s backup singers. They are just coming off their R&B hits “Every Beat of My Heart” and “Letter Full of Tears,” but they still have to crash on the floor with friends.
Midnight train: Me and Gladys Knight, but without the Pips
Gladys is off having babies in Atlanta. The Pips are touring on their own. That’s the glamorous life of musicians for you.
I wake up early the next afternoon to the sounds of the Pips harmonizing. “Every beat of my heart/Tears me further apart.”
It’s Joe and Eddie all over again. At least it’s R&B and not folk music.
Carol and I make rent any which way we can. We are always scrambling. I take a job selling shoes at the Joseph Magnin department store. A blond girl named Candy Marer works there, too. She is always getting visits from this pop-eyed geek with a watery mouth. He looks like a rickety Icha-bod Crane.
“Candy, who’s that ugly-ass old man who is always visiting you?” I ask.
She’s affronted. “I’m going to marry that ugly-ass old man,” she huffs. She does, and she becomes Candy Spelling, wife of Aaron Spelling, the most successful TV producer ever.
Diane DeMarko, the Global sisters, Alice—everybody comes down from the Bay Area to try to make it in L.A. We’re all taking odd jobs, going to auditions, tearing ass out to nightclubs every evening. We should have been a dance crew—Mooney and the Killer Women.
Hollywood isn’t a late-night town. Everyone always has early calls. But I’m so young that I can dance all night and then show up at an audition looking fresh as a daisy. I’m the first one of the crew to break through.
It’s not much, just a commercial for Vote toothpaste, a brand that’s now long gone. “Vote for Vote,” I say, and flash my pearly whites. I keep my teeth white by not bullshitting but by keeping it real. It pays off. I remember my first royalty paycheck of $56. It doesn’t sound like much, but back then the monthly rent on the two-bedroom bungalow on Sunset is $75.
All we have to do is make enough to pay for the phone and the rent. We can go without food. We live on air. We don’t care about eating.
The stand-up itch still burns my jock, so I scratch it by auditioning for the Second City improv group touring company. I do some of my Yankee Bedbug stuff, and they like it, and suddenly I’m in.
The first member of the company I get to know is Peter Boyle. Everybody Loves Racism—I mean, Everybody Loves Raymond’s Peter Boyle. I tell people that I go back so far in Hollywood that I know Peter Boyle when he has hair. I’m back on the improv tightrope. Chico and the Man’s Avery Shreiber is in the company with us, and the three of us do a lot of skits together.
Second City doesn’t pay, so I run away and join the circus. Literally. The Gatti-Charles Circus advertises for a ringmaster. I don’t hesitate. I don’t ask myself if I even know what a ringmaster does. It’s money, so I call the number and sweet-talk them on the phone.
They are surprised when I show up. I guess I didn’t sound black on the telephone. But they get over their shock, and I become the world’s first black circus ringmaster.
The best thing about the gig is the costume. I wear a tight pink jacket with brass buttons, cut like an English fox-hunting coat. I get my breeches a size too small so they are tighter than tight, and I polish my thigh-high boots to a sheen. The whole package is finished off with a satin top hat. Step right up! Once again, I am styling! I wish Mama could see me now.
We start in Southern California, then tour east to Arizona, Oklahoma, and Texas. Gatti-Charles is the creation of a furry mustache that masquerades as a man. Its name is Major Gatti. He is one of those honorary majors, just like Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s manager, is an honorary colonel.
The circus is small, not three-ring but one ring. Gatti pulls together all the animals from popular TV shows and movies. That’s the draw. The lions from Daktari. Peggy, the chimp from Bedtime for Bonzo. Bamboo Harvester, the palomino that played Mister Ed. We have everyone but Lassie.
At least, Major Gatti says the animals are movie stars. Who knows if they are or not? It’s not like we are going to check hoofprints to see if they are the real thing.
I don’t have many dealings with the stock. I look the elephants in the eye and I instantly see that they know what’s going on. They know they’re slaves.
Back then I don’t know shit about Indian or African elephants. I look Jumbo in the eye and I say, “We come from the same place, Africa.” I say, “Only a white man could look at you and think, ‘Circus,’ or ‘Theme park.’”
White men always like to ride. They like to believe they are born in the saddle. Down in San Diego at SeaWorld, they ride killer whales. “Weeee-haaaaa!”
I find riding animals about as sporting as shooting fish in a barrel.
Watching how the white handlers act with the animals in the circus makes me think they’re all crazy. They will stick their heads in a lion’s mouth. I’m thinking, Is that some freak shit, or what? Always trying to control what shouldn’t be controlled. The white man’s motto: Must control every-thing—always.
I hate how they treat the beasts to get them to do their tricks. It’s Dick Cheney–style torture. It’s inhumane. To this day, I can never see a circus as entertainment. I know too much.
The handlers can never control the chimps, though, not Peggy and her nasty gang of thugs. F*ck you, I can imagine the chimps saying, I ain’t gonna do nothing you tell me, I’m free, white, and twenty-one. (Now isn’t that a real classic American saying?)
The chimps never do the same action twice. They are totally unpredictable. The wind changes direction and sud-denly they are going crazy. Like Travis the Chimp, who does commercials and The Maury Povich Show and then chews a woman’s face off in Connecticut.
The circus band that accompanies all of the acts consists of a dozen drunks with a collection of travel-battered horns and drums. At unexpected points during the show, they abruptly launch into “God Bless America.” It happens again and again, but I never know when to expect it. I learn to bribe them so they don’t interrupt my act.
All I really have to do as ringmaster is what I am born to do: stand up in front of a crowd and look pretty. I play to the “blues,” which is circus-speak for the bleachers. I make corny jokes (“Any palomino is a pal of mine-o”) and do routines during the act changes. I lift some of my old Bedbug material, modifying it to suit the occasion.
“These animals are smart, aren’t they? What if they take over the earth? Then we’d have animal army soldiers knocking down our doors, keeping all the humans in line. Lassie would have to hide Timmy in the basement and bring him table scraps!”
Gatti-Charles makes the circus of Hollywood, when I get back to it, seem almost sane. I’m back in auditionland again. I get so I can judge just by walking into an audition if the producers are going to be color-blind. Not many of them are. If they aren’t, I turn around and walk right back out.
Through Carol I meet a girl who I can tell is interested in me. Yvonne is very pretty and almost as tall as I am. The problem is that she’s sixteen, just turning seventeen. I decide I have to wait. I go back and forth to Oakland few times, run off and join the circus again, do improv and work salesman jobs. All the while I am expecting Carol to inform me that Yvonne has found someone else and gotten married.
Only it never happens.
The year she turns eighteen, Yvonne and I are married. I know I can’t stay in the bungalow crash palace anymore. I am a married man now, and I have to provide for my beautiful woman. I find a love nest for us on Hancock Place and swear that I am turning my back on Hollywood forever.
That lasts for all of a month. Our honeymoon an idyll. All too soon, we are back in the swirl. Yvonne, Carol, and I host a party at the place on Sunset, the one where a twisted imp I just met asks if I want to have an orgy.