Little Caesar (16 page)

I was dressed too warmly, the sun was scorching now. This was not a place where one could do without sunglasses. The light was too bright, it made my eyes water. Through the blur of tears, my gaze fell on a review in the
Must See Art
section: a new exhibition,
Abgrund, by Bodo Schultz, at the Steinson & Freeler Gallery
.

Bewildered, I took the paper inside and read the article there. In an exclusive move, Bodo Schultz’s agent has offered the gallery new work. The art critic describes what he has seen: a film made by Schultz, ragged and intense. Schultz leads us along the brink of an
Abgrund
, a chasm of his own making, not the chasm of the soul but a physical one, somewhere in the jungles of Panama. He himself does not appear on camera, except for one moment; the camera is fixed on a single point, we see a man approaching and then, behind his back, there is a huge explosion. The camera is knocked over by the shockwave; a few moments later someone picks it up, it’s still running, the camera’s eye slides across a man’s torso, his face: Schultz. The charge has gone off prematurely. A slow, silent film, for the rest; each time Schultz launched into his poisoned litanies, the viewer was shocked. It was a video report of his project in the jungle – he was destroying a mountain. A mountain. The critic was impressed by the ruthlessness, praised him as a man of extreme consistency. A ‘must-see’, in other words.

There was more of Schultz’s work on display at Steinson & Freeler, but that movie, that apparently was what it was all about.

I had found information about my father on the Internet, at the terminal in Alburgh’s little library, articles about the moral implications of his work, but nothing that had interested me much at the time. To me he was the man from the postcard,
Mediohombre
, the one-armed, the one-legged. I often had the feeling he could see me.

I walked back to the hotel along broad avenues. The gallery was open from eleven to six, and closed on Sunday. La Cienega Boulevard, I had to find out where that was.

‘Where were you?’ my mother asked. ‘You mustn’t just go away without telling me where you are.’

We were in the Ocean and Vine restaurant at the Loews. I put the
LA Weekly
on the table, with her picture facing down.

‘They’re exhausting, interviews,’ she said of her own accord.

She waved her hand to dismiss the world.

‘Rollo hired a suite on the top floor. I think there must have been ten interviews in all. I barely had time to eat breakfast.’

She stuck a porcelain spoon into her decapitated egg, the soft yolk welled up, gleaming like an abscess. A little egg white was clinging to her lower lip. The droll voice of our biology teacher, Mr. Bonham Carter, when we stopped beside the
Amorphophallus titanium
during our tour of the botanical gardens at Cambridge:
Associations drawn at your own risk
.

The toast crackled between her teeth.

‘This is a lovely hotel,’ she said.

‘Who’s paying for all of this? It’s insanely expensive here.’

Her glance shot back and forth between the egg and me; she was trying to hide her uneasiness, to decide what she could tell me and what she couldn’t.

‘Darling,’ she said, ‘I don’t know . . .’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, ‘it’s already in print somewhere.’

I turned over the magazine and found the review of the exhibition. Jabbed at it with my finger. She looked, her head tilted slightly in order to read it better.

‘Aha,’ she said, leaning back in her chair.

‘Don’t you want to read it?’

‘Tell me what it says. I forgot my glasses.’

‘That’s weird,’ I said.

‘Well?’

I read aloud to her. She sat there, motionless. She didn’t touch her brunch after that. And when I was finished, ‘That man is becoming more deranged all the time.’

She flagged down a waitress.

‘Would you like something else, Ludwig?’

I passed.

‘Everything on the bill of room 304, please.’

She had no desire to go to the gallery. In the elevator she said, ‘That man destroys everything he touches.’

‘But aren’t you curious? I bet you’re dying of curiosity.’

‘Let him pay his back alimony first.’

La Cienega Boulevard was too far to walk now, I saw on the city map I’d bought that afternoon. I would have to wait until tomorrow. I hung around a bit on Main Street and was amazed by the number of holistic services on offer there. I seemed to have stumbled upon a marketplace of karma-yoga, Ayurvedic consumer goods and glass capsules filled with ionized water to help against jetlag, hangovers and all sorts of radiation, for sixteen dollars and fifty cents apiece. From all those little shops wafted the odor of incense and aromatic oils. The hippie dream had become an industry, supported by vegan surfers and Buddhists wearing flip-flops. I hissed
fuck off
at a girl who tried to press on me a flyer announcing a meeting with Yogi Amrit-something-or-other.
Experience love beyond words
, I read in passing.

It was easy to see why these surroundings and this climate were so suited to the sort of ironclad hedonism expressed so abundantly here – you couldn’t imagine this kind of bullshit in Djibouti or at sub-zero temperatures. It was a delicate lifestyle that could survive only in highly industrialized surroundings where others did the real work, or in artificial biotopes in the Second or Third World that relied on the monoculture of tourism. The hippies’ kids had grown up, this was their world – their egoism seemed even more monstrous than that of their parents.

I realized why my mother felt attracted to the West Coast. For her this was where it had all started, after a disappointing study of classical song at the conservatory in The Hague. She had a nice voice, it had been her diva dream to become a singer. But polyps on her vocal cords and, in the long run, not quite enough talent had been her downfall. In the course of her study they made it clear to her that she would never be more than a middling choir singer. With her boyfriend, she had left for the United States. He, Jelte Boender, was a rocker from Groningen province who wanted to travel Route 66. After two weeks on the road they drove into Los Angeles; the sparkle, the party everyone was talking about. They performed on street corners, he played his guitar, she sang – ‘Nights in White Satin’, ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’; slow, maudlin songs that made his skin crawl but that fit her voice, a bit sing-songish, without much power behind it. One day they saw Richard Burton and Liz Taylor walking down Hollywood Boulevard; she felt the old ambition flare up, the burning scar of the semi-talented.
She
should be the one walking there, stared upon, untouchable – handing out the occasional autograph like a benediction.

She and Jelte Boender slept at a boarding house in Culver City and lived off the pittance from their busking.

One day she was meditating on the beach when a man approached her. The paraphernalia of a photographer: tattered camera bag, Leica around his neck, the words, ‘Hello, pretty lady, could I ask you something? I hope I’m not bothering you?’

To make a long story short, he wanted to take pictures of her. Topless.

It was a Sunday afternoon, Jelte Boender was auditioning for a new rock band in Venice (which would later meet with modest success as St. Vincent and the Grenadines, albeit without Jelte Boender, who failed the audition). The man introduced himself as Gene Howard. She thought about the story she could tell later on:
I was meditating on the beach when a photographer came up to me, he looked a little bit like Kris Kristofferson, but his name was Gene Howard – that was before he became
the
Gene Howard – and said to me . . .

She went with him to the studio at his house, and as she was taking off her blouse, her bra, she did her best to summon up a sense of destiny unfolding. Gene Howard didn’t even try to get her into bed, all he wanted was her beauty. She was flattered and not nearly as shy as she’d thought she would be. Even when he asked her if she minded taking off the rest, whether he could see her naked, she didn’t experience that as a violation of her physical integrity,
all those things that people like Gloria Steinem tried to make of it
, as she told the journalist from
LA Weekly
. She had felt pretty and wanted, this was her calling; being born and growing up in east Groningen province had been a mistake. This place was her home, this light and this promise.

Gene Howard told her that he sometimes worked as production assistant to Abby Mayer, producer and director of films such as
Ride Me High
and
Harem Keeper
. She had never heard of him or his work. Howard said he would arrange a meeting.

‘Oh my God,’ Abby Mayer said when he saw her, ‘you’re . . . fresh cream and apple pie . . .’

She thought he was a bit of a creep, but she sensed that he had power. He was preparing an ambitious production, his biggest yet, and she
was
Victoria Wagner, Mayer said, the woman around whom the story of
Lilith
revolved.

‘What do I have to do?’ she’d asked. ‘What does the role involve?’

‘All you have to is be yourself – I absolutely forbid you to do anything else. To act, for example.’

She still didn’t get it, a movie in which you didn’t have to act?

‘Your body, girl, your body, that’s your means of expression. We’re going to make a gorgeous movie, the most beautiful sexy movie ever. My God, I feel like Roberto Rossellini when he saw Ingrid Bergman for the first time!’

Mayer wanted to do some screen tests. When the taxi pulled up in front of the boarding house one evening, there was no way around it: she had to tell her rocker from Groningen that she had
a kind of audition
. She explained quickly, he snorted loudly.

‘Just a skin flick, don’t let them kid you.’

He had not tried to stop her. The resignation of a man who knows that when it comes to love, he’s been living beyond his means.

Beside the pool at a house in Beverly Hills, Mayer had shot a loop with her, a sort of preliminary study for
Lilith
– just her and one man, the one who would probably be her leading man in the film, Llewelyn Reed. She thought he was attractive, he was funny.

Less than two weeks later the 8mm film hit the market and the buzz began. A spectacular new girl, Abby Mayer had discovered her. They were going to make a big movie in Thailand.

The loop has been lost, but the stage name Mayer dreamed up for her remains: Eve LeSage. No one knows precisely what was to be seen in that preliminary study, but one thing is certain: she had glorious sex with Llewelyn Reed.

The camera never got in her way. That was important. Some people froze in front of the camera. Not her. She had never noticed this certain kind of exhibitionism in herself before, but she didn’t try to deny its logical conclusion. When it came to her body, she knew no shame.

In those years the ideals of hippiedom are rapidly becoming commercialized, free love has paved the way for a deluge of pornography. It’s an easy way to make money, and the profession poses no academic requirements, it demands only sublime bodies. This, she thinks, is the start of something bigger – from here she will be taken up into the legitimate world of moviemaking, the red carpets, the cover of
Rolling Stone
. Porno and Hollywood will become one, no doubt about it, it is only a matter of time. It’s so close, a hop, skip and a jump really. The resemblance is already so striking, the infrastructure, the hierarchy on the set, the star of the film, everything the same – only the one is called an art form, the other smut.

*

She flew to Bangkok with Gene Howard. Slowly but surely he had assumed the role of her manager – she liked that, business matters couldn’t hold her attention for long. The crew had flown out ahead, the waiting began. Waiting for the sun, waiting for the cases of food poisoning and collective dysentery to pass, waiting for permits – and when the waiting was over, the movie was shot in about three weeks. For the genre, the screenplay was fairly elaborate, a story about the eternal triad of power, jealousy, revenge.

Llewelyn Reed had fallen in love with her and courted her with little gifts. Gene Howard, who was the production assistant and had the room next to hers, warned her about it: Reed always fell in love with his co-stars, then broke their hearts. It was thirty-two degrees in the shade. During the sex scenes, Reed’s makeup dripped onto her body. Gene Howard said, ‘You lie there like a cold mackerel. Move a little, even if it’s only your hands. And try not to look like you’re getting raped.’

But it was precisely that lack of expression, that stasis, which would become her trademark. Abby Mayer was enraptured, from behind the camera he shouted, ‘You might not win an Oscar, but you’re gonna be some kind of love goddess!’

Marthe Unger’s hotel life began. She grew accustomed to room service. In California, after a while, she consorted only with Europeans and New Yorkers.

‘It’s like the Californians’ brains have been fried by the sun,’ she said.

She tried to develop an addiction to vodka and cocaine – everyone around her, after all, was addicted to something – but it only exhausted her. She couldn’t summon up the energy for it, she was too
tired
for an addiction. Norman Mailer wrote about her in
Esquire
, or rather, about
the most lusted-after body in the world
. She drank champagne with Hugh Hefner and denied rumors that she had gone to bed with him. And finally she left for New York, because the people there seemed more interesting. She met Andy Warhol and later Mick Jagger as well – the photographs of their flirtation, young people thirsty for life, bathing in their careless beauty.

She had earned only three thousand dollars with
Lilith
. Gene Howard had forgotten to divvy up the principal. There was no lack of men with plans for her. A lot of people had a strange way of laughing, she’d noticed that already, too adamant, a tinkling laughter that echoed with self-interest. Rollo Liban didn’t laugh. She had met him at a party at the penthouse of one of the bigwigs at Atlantic Records, a fabulous suite with a rooftop garden at the St. Regis. Rollo Liban was a large man, he still had all his hair back then. He had an agency, he
ran girls
, as he put it, but it was worth your while to work for him, you got at least half the earnings. That was exceptional, that was a miracle; you had the feeling he was protecting you, that he was standing behind you. Rollo Liban was credited with having defined the difference between erotic art and porno.