A reporter once famously asked Bette Davis if she had any advice about Hollywood. “Take Fountain,” she barked, invoking the name of the less traveled route running parallel to both Sunset and Santa Monica Boulevards. She herself lived and died overlooking the avenue, ensconced in what I can only imagine to be the turret of a glamorous old apartment building near the one that doubled as Catherine Oxenberg’s family manor in Dynasty. I don’t know why the location of the off-Fountain enclave of little Hollywood bungalows where I live—whose vintage Craftsman cottages visitors have variously described as Pleasantville, Munchkinland and the Technicolor Village—feels like such a strong reason to fight the Greedy Foreign Landlord and his illegal eviction. I can’t really afford to live in Hollywood at all without the benefit of rent control—and “Julie Goes To Silverlake” “Echo Park” or “Koreatown” were starting to seem like really stupid character names. Let’s face it, though—my dramatic need to be Norma Rae, Erin Brockovich, Karen Silkwood and whoever it is Charlize Therone is playing this year in a pathetic bid for another Oscar was really behind my decision to stand and fight. This is my life story, after all, and that’s what the heroine does.
Which is why it’s with so many mixed feelings I announce that a deal has been struck. Persuaded by my Type A Lawyer Sister to avoid both her wrath and that of the Department of Housing—Greedy offered a large enough cash settlement for me to live on for the next couple of months. This means no more silly temp job at the Legendary Hollywood Trade Paper, where the puffy little woman I got stuck replacing during her fourth annual pregnancy is about to return anyway. It means finishing my spec, writing a Big Hollywood Book Proposal and polishing that script a Certain A-List Actress “loves, loves, loves.” It means, in short, one last chance.
In some wildly implausible Hollywood twist of fate, yesterday I discovered yet another vintage hamlet, where I am going to be living as of Sunday. I’d never before noticed the hidden village despite living only blocks away for the last nine years. Its sky-high front gate gives way to a cloistered courtyard, shaded by hundred-year-old oak trees—and flanked on either side by attached patio homes with storybook front stoops and original wooden awnings. It must have provided housing for the old Charlie Chaplin studios, now the Jim Henson Studios, also in the neighborhood.
Hollywood was little more than a sprawling orange grove when Chaplin built his landmark lot, with its Colonial clapboard cottages and Tudor mansion façade. During the TV craze of the 1950s, CBS took over the space to house The Adventures of Superman, The Red Skelton Show, and Perry Mason. It was later the headquarters of A&M Records, where so many musical legends gathered to record Michael Jackson’s "We Are the World." My nearby unit was recently vacated after many decades when they carted some poor old guy off to the nursing home. I hope I go like Bette Davis, chain smoking Vantages smeared with red lipstick, enunciating every last word as though it Begins With A Capital Letter. What I can’t get out of my mind is the scene at the end of the 1992 film Chaplin, where Robert Downey, Jr.’s exiled Charlie finally returns to town to take one last look at his legacy. Having somehow managed to stave off my own exile at the top of my rousing third act, I guess now all that’s pretty much up to Kermie and me.
