LITMIR.BIZ

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was probably on one of these conscientious missions down the line that I discovered the painful truth that what I was doing was absolutely pointless. As soon as I’d cleaned my windows, off they went around the corner where another inspector would dirty them up. I wouldn’t have minded stepping in at the end of the process – giving that windscreen the clean of its life and sending it out into the world so everyone could say, ‘Yes, it’s sparkling wonderfully, I’ll buy ten of those.’ It wasn’t just a question of ego – well, not entirely – all I wanted was to be able to take pride in a job well done.

      The processes of industrial mass-production were not the only aspect of the student employment market that seemed to conspire against an individual’s God-given right to take satisfaction in his work. The most white-collar of my temporary employments, a mail-room gig in the office of Welton Becket, LA’s most prestigious architects (the first of many professional opportunities contacts made at Oxy would bring me – remember, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know), was no less disillusioning. It seemed progress up the social and/or economic ladder was no insurance against having to compromise your principles.

      That firm was working on what became the new LA Music Center concert hall, and Dorothy Chandler – the department store heiress and wife of LA Times proprietor Otis Chandler, who was a big noise on the board of the orchestra – was constantly coming in and tinkering with the models, so that you’d see these amazing designs being constantly corrupted. I started to feel that maybe the way Welton Becket got to be number one architect was by bending with the wind that was coming out of the arses of their clients. I was young and idealistic then, so this kind of thing made me crazy.

      Although I was only dimly aware of the way the cards were falling at the time, in retrospect it was becoming increasingly clear that only the corruption-free environment of show business could provide me with the kind of morally pure working environment I was looking for. It wasn’t so much that I knew where I was going, but that I knew which doors I didn’t want to walk through. So I declared I would only do work I had complete control over and never work just for money.

      My first step in that direction, on leaving Chevrolet in a fit of artistic pique, was to get a job for the rest of that summer with a children’s theatre. Designing and building sets, painting myself green and pretending to be an ogre was much more fun than washing windscreens for a living, and the relatively small amount of experience I accumulated there enabled me to somehow blag myself an improbably high-powered position for the next summer as ‘drama coach’ at Camp Roosevelt – a select summer dumping ground for the children of Hollywood A-listers in my favourite San Bernardino mountains, up above Palm Springs.

      The vertiginous physical terrain I already knew and loved, but in ‘professional’ terms, I was massively out of my depth, having no formal theatrical training of any kind. In some ways, Camp Roosevelt would set the pattern for the rest of my life – go in at the top, then work my way down. It was also enormous fun. This was the place where my Hollywood Jewish friend-making could really get into gear, as gentiles were outnumbered by approximately ten to one, and I became known as ‘Gilly the Goy’, after the last two words of an innocent question about a potential problem with the catering – ‘What are we going to do about the [orange] juice?’ – were misheard by one of my fellow camp counsellors as ‘ . . . the Jews’.

      Everything went swimmingly for the first six weeks or so, until I gradually began to sense that the lavish production of Alice in Wonderland that I had promised to deliver as the centrepiece of the final parents’ visiting day of the summer was far too elaborate to actually pull off. My ambitious plans foundered on the lack of any organisational infrastructure to help translate my vision from two dimensions into three – imagining the whole thing was the easy part, the difficult bit was the reality of actually doing it without the facilities, time, money, or basic talent to make it happen. Whenever I’d start to get something going, these Hollywood brats would have to go off horse-riding or for an archery lesson – so they were not at all like grown-up actors in any way.

      Where better to experience the first real catastrophe of my career than in loco parentis for the temporarily abandoned children of such Hollywood bigshots as Hedy Lamarr, Danny Kaye (whose charming daughter Dena has remained a good friend of mine to this day), the director William Wyler (whose son behaved like a little shit but ultimately responded quite well to discipline) and composer Ernest Gold (whose son Andy would end up playing the guitar riff and arranging ‘Heart Like A Wheel’ with Linda Ronstadt)?

      I ended up pulling the plug in the final week before the show. It’s such a weird thing to establish yourself within a community and then feel like you’ve let down everyone within it. The scars run deep . . . even unto today when I often wake from a dream of the fear of repeat failure on whatever my current project might be.

      Nevertheless, my over-riding memories of that summer of my junior (i.e. third) year at Occidental are still happy ones. At weekends, a few of us counsellors sometimes got to escape down to Palm Springs, where one of our number’s stepmother turned out to be the divine Debbie Reynolds, who had now married a shoe magnate (the yet more seductive intervention of Liz Taylor having done for Debbie’s first marriage to Eddie Fisher) and whose second home was a sleek, desert-modern house with a fabulous swimming pool.

      These rough drawings are all that remain of what could have been – had it only gone ahead – one of the most disastrous summer - camp theatre productions of all time. I think it’s safe to say that my loss was Lewis Carroll’s gain, but looking at them now I can still feel the formative trauma of this last-minute cancellation gnawing at my guts.

      The idea of being in a movie star’s home, swimming in her pool and even – in a potentially calamitous show of youthful exuberance – bouncing on her bed, was thrilling beyond anything I had ever previously dreamed of. Perhaps it was for the best that I didn’t know at this point that some years later I would get to dance with Debbie. The excitement would have been too much.

      I was certainly starstruck. But the funny thing about preparing to graduate from college in the America of the early 1960s was that my yen for Hollywood glamour and the high-minded ideals of making the world a better place that had first carried me to Occidental did not at that point feel fundamentally incompatible. The swearing-in of President Kennedy in January 1961 lent a newly youthful lustre to the highest office of State, and JFK’s launch of the Peace Corps later on that same year even made the idea of doing worthwhile things in far-off lands briefly fashionable.

      The crusading atmosphere of the all too short-lived Kennedy presidency was another notable instance of theoretically archaic imagery pervading the American pop culture of my youth. As the optimistic post-inauguration spring of 1961 turned to summer, the original cast recording of Camelot – Lerner and Loewe’s Tony Award-winning Broadway musical adaptation of T H White’s compendium of Arthurian legend – was America’s number one album for months on end.

      The name of King Arthur’s legendary court would become posthumously entwined with the memory of JFK from the moment his widow mentioned his love for the show in a Time magazine interview shortly after his death, but before that it was more of a subconscious linkage. That show was the vehicle for a veritable bus-load of strange attractors as far as I was concerned. Richard Burton played the chief Grail-seeker and Julie Andrews (whose own alluring cameo in this book is still a little way off) his Guinevere, but it was the show’s less famous but similarly well-regarded director, Moss Hart, who was about to provide the cue for my next move.

      Of course vietnam ~ a.k.a. the War Corps (e) ~ would soon change all that. But in the meantime, enough of my missionary instincts had survived my dwindling prospects of academic success for me to still be applying for postgraduate study abroad in my final year at Oxy. My desire to travel to exotic destinations – Hong Kong, the Philippines, the Punjab, anywhere – seems to have been more

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