|
THE WILD ONES
Laid Bare: A Memoir of Wrecked Lives & The Hollywood Death Trip
by M.G. LORD (Village Voice)
There was a time when I thought too many people were getting sober. The whole world, I feared, would become boring prigs. Then I read John Gilmore's
Laid Bare: A Memoir of Wrecked Lives and the Hollywood Death Trip and changed my mind. If anyone needs a reminder of how grotesque and dull it is to be constantly stupefied, this is it. A sort of first-person
Hollywood Babylon, this book is the byproduct of such stupefaction. It suffers from a lack of
organization - as if the debauched nights that make up Gilmore's story took a toll on the acuity required to structure it. Still, the book performs a commendable chore, alerting people that fame is rarely what it's cracked up to be.
A second-tier actor who once wrote a biography of James Dean, Gilmore reports on his drug-and-drink-ravaged celebrity friends: Janis Joplin, Hank Williams, Lenny Bruce, Steve Mc-Queen, Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson. He opens with a brutal portrait of Joplin: "a lump-faced kid with sores on her skin, frumpy like someone working a hot-dog stand." Then he delicately reveals that "she fucks like a truck" and, because of insecurity about her appearance, lets guys use her "like you'd use a hole in the fence."
Rarely does she sing in his story; rather, she shoots up, throws up, and occasionally throws herself at the author, who is grossed out by her "old lady's brassiere." Not so grossed out, however, that they don't exchange one of the weirdest kisses ever: "It was a strange moment, as though she'd put a lei around my neck with a kiss, welcoming me to her island. I was penetrating through her, coming our the other side other body. Her thighs moved like arms, and she made
sounds - strange, foreign sounds that had nothing to do with who we were or where we were."
If a prize were given for sheer disgustingness, Hank Williams, who died at age 29, would place second to
Joplin - so devastated was he by alcohol that he couldn't control his bladder. Likewise, Gilmore paints Steve McQueen as an insanely ambitious philanderer, driven by the need to escape his alcoholic mother. "Stewed to the gills, his mother would press against some guy drinking with Steve and make a play for drinks," Gilmore observes. Although Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson do not emerge as saints, the tales he tells of them are tamer, no doubt because they are still alive. Books like Gilmore's would vanish if the law precluded libeling the dead.
Laid Bare might have been stronger if Gilmore had evened out its tone. One is never sure if he condemns his youthful depravity, or pats himself on the back for being part of a celebrity crowd. When he denounces other actors for "cutting someone else out of work to jockey yourself in front of the camera," I get the sense that he has done such jockeying himself.
The book may be of interest to some readers as a travelogue of New York and especially L.A. It records a lost world: structures that have either been torn down or lost their
cachet - such as the once-snazzy Garden of Allah Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, where Gilmore recalls Errol Flynn at midday, downing his second fifth of vodka. Cars, too, are almost characters in the
story - a consequence, perhaps, of Gilmore having fallen in love with them as a teenager in L.A. He recalls his "joy" driving into Manhattan in a "new '57 Coupe de Ville," and seeing himself and the car reflected in "a New York window.'" And he explores McQueen's relationship with his MG: eager to be viewed as a loner, McQueen would make his dates crouch on the floor, so he could zip a cover over the passenger seat and appear to be by himself
The best way to absorb Laid Bare would, I think, be on audiotape in a car.
...Gilmore would be fun to hear: a rambling, entertaining passenger, recalling days that were, if not good, at least old.
|
