Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Read online

  She twists the tiny knob on the lamp till it clicks and the room is bathed in a glowing red light. She watches the couple in bed for a reaction to the change in atmosphere, ready to race out of there if the red light has disturbed their REM. But the low-watt red bulb is still dark enough not to disrupt their slumber.

  So she climbs up onto the chair by the window, her naked body framed in the windowsill, backlit by a red-hued Amsterdam-like tableau in the middle of Pasadena. She smiles down at her friends below on the sidewalk, who jump up and down in excitement at Debra Jo’s accomplishment. The sixteen-year-old brunette begins gyrating a go-go dance in the window for the amusement of her friends outside. They applaud and cheer her on. She undulates up and down, dancing wilder and wilder, while her friends whoop and whistle, till she jumps off the chair, runs across the floor, and leaps into the bed with the sleeping old couple with a cackling “Geronimo!”

  The old couple wakes to find this naked brunette teenager rolling around in bed with them, laughing like a lunatic. The old woman lets out a bloodcurdling scream, as the old man sputters, “What the hell?”

  Debra Jo throws her arms around the old man’s neck and plants a big kiss on his toothless mouth. When he tries to scream, she shoves her tongue inside of it. Then she lets go, hops out of the bed, runs out of the room, down the stairs, through the living room (snatching her clothes as she goes by), out the open sliding-glass door, through the backyard and the backyard gate, across the front lawn, and down Greenbriar Lane with her “Family,” laughing.

  Chapter Six

  “Hollywood or Bust”

  Outside of Dallas, Texas

  Four Years Earlier

  The rodeo cowboy in the dirty white ’59 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, pulling a dirty white horse trailer with a dusty brown horse in it, spotted the young lady with her thumb sticking out on the side of the road on the highway heading out of Dallas about a quarter of a mile before he reached her. She sported a tight pink T-shirt, a banana-colored miniskirt, long bare legs and bare feet, a big white sun hat, and a canvas duffel bag. Once the cowboy got closer, he saw that tight pink T-shirt covered two large bouncing boobs, and her long bare legs were uncommonly white.

  When he pulled over to the side of the road and she bent down to look at him through the passenger-side car-door window, he noted she had long golden-blond hair hanging down from the white sun hat; she was about twenty-two and a goddamn good-looking gal.

  “Need a lift?” he asked rhetorically.

  “I sure do,” said the blonde, sans Texas accent.

  The cowboy turned down Merle Haggard crooning about Tulare Dust on the radio and said, “Where y’all goin’?”

  “California,” was the big-boobed blonde’s reply.

  Spitting snuff juice into an empty Texaco paper coffee cup a tenth filled with brown saliva, the cowboy chuckled, “California? Well, that’s a ways away.”

  “I know,” she said, nodding. “Can you help me out?”

  “I don’t know ’bout California,” the cowboy qualified, “but I intend to get outta Texas by seven this evening. I could drop ya off in New Mexico.”

  “That’s a start, cowboy.” She smiled.

  “Well, get in, cowgirl.” He smiled back.

  Before she committed to climbing into the fella’s Caddy, she examined the cowboy more closely. He was somewhere around forty-seven, handsome but weather-beaten (sorta like his Cadillac); he wore a white straw cowboy hat on his head, a cream-colored snap-button country-and-western-type shirt with armpit stains, and had a big pinch of snuff under his lip. She looked in the backseat, which had a duffel bag in it not too different from hers. Except his had an olive-green military look to it, while hers was black and had the 7 Up logo on it. She looked past the fins of the Cadillac at the horse trailer attached to the back hitch and asked, “You got a horse in that trailer?”

  “You know I do,” he said.

  “What’s his name?” she asked.

  “Her name is Honeychilde,” he drawled.

  “Well,” she said, smiling, “I suppose a fella names his mare Honeychilde ain’t gonna rape me.”

  “Well, that’s your first mistake.” He grinned at her. “A dude with a big black stallion named Boston Strangler, now, that’s a fella you can trust.” He winked.

  “Well,” the blonde said, “here goes nothin’,” throwing her duffel bag in the backseat next to his. She opened the door and climbed into the Cadillac.

  “That door is kinda fucked up,” the cowboy instructed. “You gotta slam it real hard.”

  She opened the door again and followed his instructions, slamming it real hard.

  “That’s the spirit,” he said, as he pulled back on to the highway.

  The cowboy driver got the conversation started. “So where ya goin’ in California?” He turned Merle Haggard back up to a decent volume. “L.A., San Francisco, or Pomona?”

  The blond girl asked, “Who would hitch from Texas to Pomona?”

  “Well, I just might,” the cowboy confessed. “But I ain’t no blond bathin’ beauty.”

  “Los Angeles,” she said.

  “You goin’ to be a surfer?” the cowboy asked. “Like Annette Funicello?”

  “I don’t think she’s a real surfer,” said the blonde. “In fact, neither her or Frankie even got a tan. You got more of a tan than they got.”

  “Yeah, I got ’bout five more lines in my forehead than they got too.” Looking at his pretty passenger, he said, “And bless your sweet heart callin’ my sun damage a tan.”

  The young hitcher introduced herself to the older cowboy; they traded names and shook hands.

  “So where ya goin’?” the cowboy asked again.

  “Los Angeles. My boyfriend is waiting for me.”

  The blonde had no boyfriend waiting for her in Los Angeles. That’s just what she planned to tell lone men who might give her a ride. She then proceeded to talk for the next forty-five minutes about her imaginary boyfriend, which was all part of her method of hitchhiking. She gave him the name Tony.

  It was during her Tony spiel that she started trusting the white-hatted cowboy somewhat, because he was neither disappointed nor uninterested in her new life in L.A. with Anthony.

  “Well, if ya ask me,” he drawled, “this Tony’s one lucky fella!”

  “Where are you and Honeychilde off to?” the blonde asked.

  Now it was the cowboy’s turn to be a little cagey. He and Honeychilde were off to Prescott, Arizona. See, the cowboy was a rodeo rider; he’d just finished one rodeo over the weekend in Dallas, called Wild West Weekend, where he won zip-a-dee-doo-dah and banged up everything that wasn’t already busted to begin with. Now he was off to Prescott, his hometown, for another rodeo the weekend after next. The Prescott Frontier Days was the first rodeo ever held, back in 1888, and the cowboy would be damned if he was gonna lose in front of his hometown audience. All this he kept mum with the leggy blonde sitting Indian style on his passenger seat, ’cause, frankly, he didn’t know if he wanted her company that long. So he talked in detail about the rodeo in Dallas he’d just left and vaguely about where he and his horse were off to. But as the two drove and talked, they got to know each other better, and little by little their defenses dropped away.

  Being from Texas and the daughter of a military man, she liked this witty shitkicker good ol’ boy. And he liked her too, and not just to look at. She was very bright—that was clear from just a casual conversation. As they talked more, she even revealed she spoke fluent Italian, due to a time her family was stationed in Italy because of her father’s military career. Which was enough for the cowboy to classify her as a genius, especially since most of the gals he went for could barely speak English (he was partial to Mexican girls).

  The barefoot blonde would have to be dim to not realize how pretty she was. But she didn’t define her personality by how she looked. She defined it by her sweet disposition, her curiosity about other people, and her genuine excitement about adventure, an
d while a touch cautious about the dangers that could befall a young woman on the road, she was nevertheless thrilled. And you could color the cowboy charmed. In fact, it was fair to say he even got a crush on her. But since this young gal was probably no more than twenty-two, she fell outside of the range of his morally approved parameters. He had a rule to never engage in slap and tickle with anybody younger than his twenty-five-year-old daughter. Now his rule might be downgraded to a guideline if his passenger insisted. But he was aware enough to know how unlikely that was. Their relationship was that of pretty half-dressed passenger and friendly driver, and that was alright by him.

  They stopped for dinner at a choke and puke once they crossed the Texas state line into New Mexico. If she had been broke, he would have offered to buy her a bowl of chili, but since she wasn’t, he didn’t. They drove two more hours, till he pulled into a motel around nine at night.

  Okay, the blonde thought, if the cowboy’s gonna make a play, now’s the time.

  But she didn’t give him the opportunity. Before he could even offer the backseat of his car for her to sleep in, she had her duffel bag out of the back and was hugging him goodbye. He watched her bare feet walk her off into the dark distance.

  During their time together (about six hours), once she got comfortable with him, she revealed her real reason for going to Los Angeles. It was to be an actress and work in movies, or at least television. She admitted she didn’t want to say it before because it was such a cliché. Also, it sounded like such a pie-in-the-sky daydream coming from a Texas beauty-pageant winner that it even made her look a little stupid. And if people thought that, they wouldn’t be alone. Because that’s exactly what her father thought.

  But the cowboy spit out snuff juice into his little paper cup and disagreed. He told her, a gal out in Los Angeles that was as goddamn good-lookin’ as her would hafta be stupid not to try a career in pictures. Not only that, he told her, he liked her chances. “Now, if my cousin Sherry wanted to go to Hollywood and be the next Sophia Loren, that would be pie in the sky. But a pretty little gal like you,” he speculated, “I wouldn’t be surprised I don’t see you actin’ opposite Tony Curtis ’fore long.”

  As she disappeared into the night, just before she got out of earshot and he checked himself into the motel, he yelled to her one last note of encouragement: “‘member what I said—when you’re actin’ opposite Tony Curtis, you tell ’em hello for me.”

  The blonde turned around and shouted back to the cowboy, “Sure thing, Ace, see ya in the movies.” She waved one last time and walked off.

  And when Sharon Tate eventually made her motion-picture debut opposite Tony Curtis in the silly comedy Don’t Make Waves, she told Tony Curtis, “Ace Woody says hello.”

  Chapter Seven

  “Good Morgan, Boss Angeles!”

  Saturday, February 8, 1969

  6:30 A.M.

  Cliff’s Karmann Ghia drives down the practically deserted street known throughout the world as the Sunset Strip. For Cliff, this is the start of his working day, driving his car to his boss’s house, to drive his boss to Twentieth Century Fox Studios for his eight o’clock call time. As Cliff pushes the little Volkswagen engine down Sunset Boulevard at six-thirty in the morning, he thinks, If New York is the city that never sleeps, Los Angeles in the middle of the night and early wee hours of the morning turns back into the desert it was before it got paved over with concrete. A lone coyote digging through a public garbage pail demonstrates how correct that thought is. On the car radio Cliff hears the voice of Robert W. Morgan (“the Boss Tripper”), the early-morning disc jockey of AM radio’s 93 KHJ, yelling to his audience of early risers, “Good Morgan, Boss Angeles!”

  In the sixties and early seventies, all of Los Angeles pulsed to the beat of 93 KHJ. It was known as Boss Radio and it was known for playing the Boss Sounds by the Boss Jocks in Boss Angeles. That is, unless you lived in Watts, Compton, or Inglewood. In that case, you pulsed to the soul beat of KJLH.

  KHJ played the groovy sixties’ sounds of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Monkees, Paul Revere and the Raiders, the Mamas and the Papas, the Box Tops, the Lovin’ Spoonful, as well as later-forgotten groups of the era like the Royal Guardsmen, the Buchanan Brothers, Tompall and the Glaser Brothers, the 1910 Fruitgum Company, the Ohio Express, the Mojo Men, the Love Generation, and others of their ilk. Plus the station had an all-star lineup of disc jockeys, including, along with Morgan, Sam Riddle, Bobby Tripp, Humble Harve (who, like Cliff, would later kill his wife. But Harve wouldn’t get away with it), Johnny Williams, Charlie Tuna, and the number-one disc jockey in America, the Real Don Steele. Also, Robert W. Morgan, Sam Riddle, and Don Steele all had local Los Angeles music shows on KHJ-TV Channel 9. Morgan hosted Groovy, Riddle hosted Boss City, and Steele had, naturally, The Real Don Steele Show.

  The KHJ radio and TV stations dominated the market with their Zeitgeist sounds, crazy promotional contests, wild station-sponsored concerts, and a genuine sense of humor emanating from their on-air cast of cutups.

  Sam Riddle would greet his nine-A.M.-till-noon listeners with his catchphrase, “Hello, music lovers!” And the Real Don Steele would constantly remind listeners that “Tina Delgado is alive!” (his most popular and never-explained running joke).

  As Cliff drives up one of the residential hills of Hollywood, while Robert W. Morgan’s live commercial for Tanya Tanning Butter blends into the melodic do do do opening of Simon and Garfunkel’s ubiquitous Top 40 hit Mrs. Robinson, he sees four young hippie girls, age ranged sixteen to early twenties, cross the neighborhood street in front of his car at a stop sign. The girls look dirty, and not just normal unbathed hippie dirt but like they’ve been having an orgy in a garbage pail.

  All the young ladies seem to be lugging some bundles of food. One girl carries a crate of cabbage heads, another three packages of hot dog buns, still another cradles a bunch of carrots. But the fourth—a sexy, tall, thin, bushy-haired brunette flower-child type, in a crochet halter top, short-short cutoff jeans that show off her long dirty white legs, and filthy big bare feet—waddles in caboose position of this hippie-chick train, lugging a big round jar of giant green pickles as if it were a papoose.

  The dirty brunette beauty glances in Cliff’s direction and sees him through the windshield of the rumbling Karmann Ghia. A smile spreads across her pretty face in the blond dude’s direction. Cliff smiles back. The brunette hoists the pickle jar up to one arm by her right breast, leaving the other arm free to flash the Karmann Ghia driver the peace sign with her two fingers.

  Cliff holds up two fingers, flashing it back.

  They share a moment together, then the moment’s over, she’s on the other side of the street, and the filthy females baby-elephant-walk their way down the residential sidewalk. Cliff watches hippie pickle girl from behind as she walks away, willing her to take one glance back at him. One . . . two . . . three, he counts in his head, then she takes one more look back at him over her shoulder. Victory. He smiles to her and himself and presses down on the gas pedal with his moccasin-covered foot and zooms uphill.

  6:45 A.M.

  When Rick’s clock radio wakes him up to the voice of 93 KHJ’s morning disc jockey, Robert W. Morgan, he immediately feels that his pillow is soaked cold with alcohol sweat. Today will be his first day of work on a new CBS western pilot named Lancer. Naturally, he plays the heavy. A kidnapping, cold-blooded, murdering leader of a bunch of cattle rustlers, which the script refers to as “land pirates.”

  It’s a pretty good script and a darn good part, even though Rick thinks he should be playing the series lead, Johnny Lancer. Rick inquired who got the part—it’s some fella named James Stacy, who had guested on a good Gunsmoke, that CBS decided to give a show of his own. The other regulars are rugged horse-faced Andrew Duggan as the father, Murdock Lancer, and Wayne Maunder, who recently starred in a canceled series on ABC about Custer, as the other brother, Scott Lancer.

  The script is not only good but he has good dia
logue, including a lot of dialogue on the first day. So he was up late last night running lines with his tape recorder.

  He usually does that floating in his swimming pool, in his floaty chair, while he smokes and drinks whiskey sours. He makes the whiskey sours and pours them into one of the German beer steins from his German beer stein collection. How many did I have? he thinks as he lies in bed, nursing a hangover that feels closer to polio and a belly full of last night’s booze.

  The beer stein holds two barsized whiskey sour cocktails.

  How many steins?

  Four.

  Four?

  Four!

  That’s when he vomited all over himself in his bed.

  Most actors and actresses in the sixties had a couple of cocktails or glasses of wine to wind down with once they got home. But Rick turned a couple of whiskey sours at the end of the day into eight whiskey sours, till he blacked out. Rick had no memory of leaving the pool or taking his clothes off or climbing into bed. He just woke up in bed with no idea of how he got there. He looks down at the disgusting mess he made of himself, then glances at the clock radio beside the bed. It reads 6:52. Cliff’s going to be there in about twenty minutes, so he better get his shit together. The bad part about barfing on yourself when you wake up in the morning is you feel like a disgusting-pig pathetic-loser. The good part is without all that poison sloshing around in your belly you feel much better.

  What Rick didn’t know, and wouldn’t know for years, is he suffered from a condition that was not commonly known at the time. Since high school, Rick had experienced violent mood swings. His blues were bluer than most, and his highs could border on manic. But since completion of the Universal four-picture deal (and specifically Salty, the Talking Sea Otter), his downswings seemed to find a deeper basement than before. Especially alone at home at night, when loneliness, boredom, and self-pity combined to create a toxic self-detest fest, with whiskey sour cocktails his only form of relief-inducing medication.