The dream has ended
Geoffrey Wansell
Hollywood
Thepavements of Hollywood Boulevard, from the Chinese Theatre to the corner of Vine Street, still have gold 'stars' set into the cement as memorials to the film in- dustry's heroes, but the brass name plates on the doors are scuffed and corroded. Where 50 years ago there were premieres twice a week, there are now video porn shops, topless bars and massage parlours. What was once Sardi's restaurant is now a Mexican hardcore cinema. The offices of Central Casting are now a run-down pool hall, next door to a 'guaranteed totally nude bar'. Across the street the original Fox studios have been replaced by a Bank of America that is so frightened of fraud by its customers that it will never change more than $100 in travellers' cheques, no matter what identification you produce. The Top Hat Malt. Shop, where Lana Turner actually was discovered one after- noon, while she wasp laying truant from Hollywood High' School across the road (it never was in Schwab's Pharmacy — that was a publicity stunt), is now a Chevron petrol station. The studio where Cecil B. DeMille, Jesse LaskY and Sam Goldwyn produced Hollywood's first full-length feature, The Squaw Man, is now a parking lot for MacDonald's, and the Hollywood Hotel, where Valentino was shut out of his honeymoon suite, is a parking lot for a
bank. The Trocadero is also a parking lot, and the stars have gradually left Hollywood. Robert Redford has retired to the Rocky Mountains, Clint Eastwood to the sea at Carmel, and Paul Newman to Connecticut (when he is not in New York selling the salad dressing he is making and naming after him). Dustin Hoffman is in New York, and so is Woody Allen. Only Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson of the younger generation of actors stick it out amidst the sleaze and violence.
My wife took our 20-month-old son shopping on Hollywood Boulevard shortly after 10 o'clock one morning last August. It was a bright, sunny and comparatively smog-free day. Before my wife knew what was happening a woman walking towards her had snatched my son out of her hands and started to run off with him. My wife snatched him back again after a chase, and the woman hit her. Not a single pedestrian stopped to help, and there was not a police- man in sight. Finally in despair my wife grabbed my son and ran off. When we told our neighbours in Hollywood, they were not surprised. 'You shouldn't get out of the car. We'd have told you if you'd asked. The woman across the street from you had her three-month-old snatched out of her maid's arms when she answered the door not long ago. You can get anything up to $20,000 for a white child on the black market.'
But it is not just young children who are at risk. In the old residential area of Han- cock Park, where Howard Hughes once liv- ed and not far from where Mae West ended her days just two years ago, the residents are so frightened they are talking about organising themselves into vigilante groups after a series of brutal and apparently ran- dom murders. Shortly after 11 o'clock one evening a few weeks ago a 19-year-old school basketball star, who had just been accepted for Princeton, was sitting outside the front door of his parents' large house in Hancock Park talking to his girlfriend in his car. The porch lights were on, and so were the car lights and the street lights.
Suddenly, and without any warning, a man walked up to the open window of the car, put a gun to the boy's head and blew his brains out. Not a single word was spoken. He then dragged the boy's body out of the car and searched its pockets before he ran off, leaving the girl hysterical. The Los Angeles police were horrified, but not surprised. 'There's a tendency to shoot first these days,' one said, 'Either they don't want witnesses, or they're just angry at the world.'
In the city where a thousand television cops have tracked down .a million murderers it seems unreal. You expect the victims to get up and walk back to make-
up, but they don't; and it adds to the bizarre quality of it all. The grotesque seem to leap from every side.
Only a month ago, for example, a young woman walked into a Hollywood bar short- ly before two in the morning. She ordered a drink, but before long she jumped on to the bar and started dancing to the juke box. She then started taking her clothes off. The bar was closing, so she jumped down from the bar and danced out into the street, followed by a small crowd from the bar. She had by then stripped down to her brassiere.
Suddenly she put her hand inside it and pulled out a small pistol. Again without warning she fired into the crowd and one bullet ricocheted off the pavement and penetrated the genitals of a man who had stopped to see what the commotion was about. As he collapsed, the young woman ran off, still only partly clothed. She was never caught.
It is incidents like that which begin to convince even those who love the myths of Hollywood and its dream factory that the death of the old movie queen cannot be long delayed. It is impossible to escape the impression that the lice are already begin- ning to swarm over the cadaver of what was once one of the most glamorous places in the world.
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