I’d arrived in Los Angeles two years earlier, on New Year’s Eve, 1979, after completing graduate work at the University of Minnesota and deciding that I wouldn’t survive another midwestern winter. So after a three-day road trip in my ex-husband’s Chevrolet Impala that included striking a deer in South Dakota, running out of gas a hundred miles outside of Boulder, and picking up a hitchhiker in Tucson who swore the end times were imminent, I rented a two-story bungalow on the edge of Echo Park rumored to have once belonged to Rosalind Russell, and found work teaching Art History courses at a local community college.
By June I’d settled in to a routine where, after returning from work in the late afternoons, I’d nap on the couch until 8 or 8:30 p.m., and then, after a quick shower and an even quicker meal, I’d put an extra roll of film into my purse, sling the Nikon camera I favored in those years cross-wise around my neck, and then spend most of the night shooting the city.
Los Angeles in 1984 was a different place than it is now. The air was dirtier, certainly, and parts of the city, especially downtown and along the Sunset Strip, seemed as if they were attempting to challenge Times Square, which was then in its post-apocalyptic heyday, for primacy in the rankings of the most depressing place in America. And yet I’d also found a sense of belonging in the City of Angels—no small feat considering it was a city whose sprawl represented the metropolitan equivalent of the British Empire—that I’d never experienced anywhere else. Perhaps it was because the permanent sunshine and proximity to the ocean provided a sense of paradisal wonder even for the region’s most depressed areas. Perhaps it was my newfound sense of possibility in the wake of a marriage whose final years had doubled as a live-reading of a Eugene O’Neill play. Or perhaps it was simply that it was the kind of place where there was never any shortage of colorful things—and people—to photograph.
The Sunset Strip, however, was hardly a favorite area of mine. Maybe it’s because it had long been overdone as a subject for street photographers. The joke among artist friends in those years was that the hustlers at the Vine Street intersection were as recognizable as any A-list actor, and the prostitutes whose territory stretched from the sidewalk just north of the Rainbow Room to just south of the Whiskey A Go-Go got more time in front of the camera than Hugh Hefner’s stable of Playmates. Therefore, I went months in between photography trips into West Hollywood, instead choosing to roam the sections of the city that, more often than not, rarely found their way into the collective artistic mythology of the place.
Be that as it may, once in a while, after tiring of shooting homeless encampments in Pershing Square, or teenaged valley girls in roller skates and too-much lipstick, or beat cops smoking cigarettes and ignoring their radios in the back alleys off Sixth and Temple, Sunset Boulevard would call me back to it as I were a female Odysseus and it was my neon-lit Ithaca.
On the night in question, I parked my car up the street from the Roxy Theater—where I’d once seen Bob Dylan play a three-and-a-half-hour concert so exhilaratingly strange that I’ve been thinking about it ever since—slipped my purse under the seat, wrapped the leather strap of the camera around my wrist, and started walking in the direction of the Garden of Buddha, a revival movie theater specializing in black-and-white monster films, Blaxploitation classics, and B-grade action films made on budgets so microscopic it often seemed likely that the actors had been asked to bring their cars and wardrobes to the shoot.
The first photograph I took that night was of a poster advertising the imminent release of Warren Beatty’s Reds, a love story set against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution that had won several Academy Awards. That the film in question had been released three years earlier, and that the poster, battle-scarred though it was, had somehow survived, lent it the same air of stoic heroism that Francis Scott Key insisted the War of 1812 had endowed the American flag with.
Over the next hour, I shot ten or twelve pictures, most of them candids featuring people interacting with the world around them: a nightclub promoter holding a sheath of pink flyers in front of a closed flower shop; two female street musicians—one playing a beat-up banjo, the other strumming a teardrop-shaped mandolin—who had just finished turning “Amazing Grace” into a bluegrass rave-up; an older lady in a mink coat walking a Great Dane in front of a small bookstore with a Reagan For President button pinned to her fuzzy lapel. It was moments after I’d taken that last one when I heard a voice behind me say,
“You should take my picture.”
I turned to see a woman, roughly my age (I was thirty-seven that year), dressed in white thigh-high go-go boots, a purple feathered boa, and enough glitter covering her bare shoulders and cheeks to make it look as if she’d showered in stardust. She was leaning against an opened door and was smoking a cigarette with the kind of élan that Lauren Bacall had mastered in her early films with Humphrey Bogart.
Without responding I lifted my camera and, as I was adjusting the focus, she added,
“Not now. After.”
“After?”
“I work until closing tonight. Can you come back at 2:30?”
“Yes,” I said, though I don’t know why I did. Night owl though I may have been, I was usually back at my house in Echo Park by midnight at the latest, so that I could spend a few hours working in the upstairs den I’d turned into a dark room before turning in.
“There’s a door around back,” she said, taking a final drag and then crushing the butt beneath the heel of her boot. “David will let you in.”
I said,
“A quick one now though.”
“Make it good,” she said, looking straight into the lens and pursing her lips.
Around 11 p.m. I slipped into a record store nestled in between two bars that seemed to be competing for who could be the most tasteless: one was called The Cathedral, where drinks were served in wooden cups meant to resemble Holy Grails by waitresses wearing Catholic schoolgirl-style skirts short enough to guarantee that the bottom half of their butt-cheeks were visible as they criss-crossed the room; the other was called Wonderland, and it boasted a neon sign which featured a buxom Alice having her top removed by a grinning Cheshire Cat.
All of which made Eight Days a Week Records a welcome reprieve from the varying degrees of decadence that were the Strip’s stock-in-trade in those years, and by the time I left, shortly after midnight, I had a copy of Laura Nyro’s Gonna Take a Miracle under my arm, and what would turn out to be a great photograph of one of the store’s employees, a sixty-something earth mother with gray hair down to her waist. The next few hours were passed in a diner straight out of an Edward Hopper painting, where I ate a hamburger and a mound of over-salted french fries before splurging on a frosted milkshake.
Shortly before 2:30 I turned down the alley to find that it featured, among the usual overfull garbage cans and emptied storage crates, a mural of Andy Warhol lying naked on a sofa, with Marilyn Monroe pointing a small camera in his direction. It was a Magritte-meets-Lichtenstein type of thing, and it was done in such bright colors that it seemed to glow in the dark. I stood mesmerized by it for a few moments, much the way my teenaged self once had done upon finding a stash of black-and-white European postcards that my older sister had stuffed into the pages of an old Anais Nin paperback, which featured nude men holding a variety of gymnastic poses and in various states of arousal. Finally, I raised the camera and took a few shots before I knocked on the small red door of the club.
It took thirty seconds or so before the door was opened by a quite handsome man in his early thirties. He was dressed in black cargo pants and a tight black t-shirt that showed off his muscled physique. Between that and his crew-cut, he looked like someone whose dream was to have a lead in one of the many police procedurals that dominated television in those years.
“You’re here for Jeannie?” he asked with the kind of conspiratorial whisper that made me feel as if her name were the password to a Prohibition-era speakeasy.
“Yes,” I said, though she’d never told me her name.
“Come on in,” he said. “I’m David.”
He held the door open for me as I entered, and after closing it, he dropped the dual deadbolts back into place, nodded towards a hallway on the other side of the room, and then turned and walked past the elevated stage before disappearing through a door behind the bar.
Even in semi-darkness, the club gave off a feeling of faux glamour, its light fixtures and overall design scheme a passable attempt to replicate the Moulin Rouge-like sensibilities of Belle Époque Paris. As I made my way down the hall, pausing to look at the photographs of the club’s dancers that lined the walls, I found myself surprised with the intensity of my envy towards them. Perhaps it was as simple as the fact that I had never even liked to look at myself in the mirror, but by the time I stood before the half-open dressing room door at the end of the hall, I was waist-deep in self-recrimination for my constant need to always be the watcher, and never the watched.
“I didn’t know if you’d come,” she said, as I slowly entered the room.
“It’s a little late past my bedtime,” I said.
“Well, you know what they say.”
“I don’t know that I do.”
“Nothing good happens before 2 a.m.”
“I’d always heard it the other way.”
“That just means you’ve been listening to the wrong people.”
While we spoke she stood in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror, her white boots now replaced by a pair of shined men’s dress shoes, and her formerly bare legs now covered by pinstriped slacks that rode high on her waist. The black dress shirt that she was in the process of buttoning, along with her slicked-back hair (which was tied into a tight ponytail in the back), made her look like a young—albeit still beautiful—Howard Hughes.
“You’re quite the chameleon,” I said.
“Occupational hazard,” she answered.
“It’s a nice club,” I said, not sure what else to say.
“It’s alright. Especially when there’s no one else here.”
I looked around at the room-full of mirrors, and thought of the famous scene at the end of Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai. Comparing things to old movies was a habit of mine I’d inherited from my mother, a former regional theater actress who’d made something of a name for herself in summer stock shows all over the Northeast.
“What about you?” she asked.
“Me?”
“Yeah, you,” she said, smiling with her eyes rather than her mouth. “You take pictures for a living?”
“No, I’m an Art History professor.”
“So this is a hobby?”
“It’s what I do when I can’t sleep.”
She tossed the tissue she’d been using to wipe off her eyeliner into the small, sequined wastebasket under the counter, and said,
“You’re in the wrong city then.”
“What do you mean?”
“My father always said you move to New York if you can’t sleep. You come to Los Angeles for something else.”
“What’s that?”
“Because no one else will take you.”
“Was that true for him?”
“He was a cop who wished he was a botanist. We kept a small garden in our backyard, and every single day of his life he’d pluck one flower from it and give it to my mother. So yes, I think it was,” she said, before turning to me and adding,
“Ready.”
“In here?” I asked.
“No. Come on.”
I followed her back down the hallway and into the main room. She lifted one of the chairs and carried it with her up onto the stage. It looked as if she was about to say something when we heard footsteps from across the room, the familiar sound of high-heels on a hardwood floor.
I turned to see a woman with dark hair falling past her shoulders and whose shimmering dress was short enough for me to gaze at every inch of her sculpted legs. As she approached, with her red lipstick and long, accentuated eyelashes, I marveled at the transformation. Ten minutes earlier I’d thought he was a young Steve McQueen; now he was Ali MacGraw.
I envied David the way I’d envied the photographs in the hallway a few minutes prior. It was one of those nights, I guess, when I wanted to be anyone on earth besides myself.
“This is Diane,” Jeannie said.
“It’s nice to meet you, Diane. I’m Louise.”
“You don’t look like a Louise,” Diane said.
“Really?” I asked, blushing.
“You’re more of a Penelope.”
“You’re such a flirt,” Jeannie said.
“I learned from the best,” Diane answered.
“That’s right. You did,” Jeannie said, offering Diane the same smile with her eyes that she had given me back in the dressing room.
We shot for a half an hour. Most of the images had Jeannie sitting backwards on the chair, her legs straddling its back, with Diane striking a variety of poses around her. Somehow I didn’t mind shooting posed shots that night. Later on Diane removed her dress to reveal the lace panties she wore beneath. My favorite of the shots we took, which is hanging on the wall of my studio as I write this, is one where Diane, clad now in only those high heels, leans in to give Jeannie a kiss on the cheek. The look of absolute confidence in Jeannie’s eyes, coupled with the sharp lines of Diane’s body, gives the picture an out-of-time quality, as if suddenly we were no longer in a faux, Fin de siécle Parisian nightclub, but the real thing.
Afterwards, as Diane went behind the bar to fix us drinks, Jeannie, lighting up a cigarette, said,
“What about you?
“Me? What do you mean?”
“Do you ever pose? Or do you just hide behind the lens?”
“Hide,” I said. “It’s what I do best.”
“That won’t do,” she said, squinting at me. “You know the way to the dressing room. Pick out whatever you want. And leave the camera. I’ll get it ready.”
Photo ©Levi Meir Clancy
