Fragile Industries:

I have really lousy family role models for women who can love and appreciate other women. My mother has always had tortured relationships with female … friends? Rarely. Hairdressers. Maids. People she pays. My birth household never held a kaffeeklatch. Mom has loathed, uniformly and without distinction, any woman who marries into her family at any generational level -- wives to her father, wives to brothers, wives to sons … she proclaims an admiration to my father’s (her ex-husband’s) second wife, but they’ve spent about 15 minutes together. Her oldest girlfriends are dead, deep into Alzheimer’s, or beneath contempt.

I have no blood sisters. My stepsister, nearly my age, has tried to be a friend, and I hers, but birth and life circumstances and a completely disparate life view prevents commonality.

It’s no wonder I’ve had to carve my own niche for female friends that are not lovers. In my mid-30’s, and 400 miles away from maternal modeling, I learned and cherished how to enjoy the company of women. OK, I’m bisexual, but I have a very regressive view of sex with anyone, and the women I wanted to know in the biblical sense were not friends. The female friends I’ve made in the last 20 years I have cherished, for their wisdom, their humor, and all those things we can say to one another and no one else. In the last 20 years, these, more than any straight male relationship, I have treasured before all others. Not only are they confidants and support, they are models for whom I would like to be when I sufficiently absorb the teachings of (OK, shoot me now) Jesus. I’m sorry, but He's my buddy, my bro, my pal. I’m crazy about the guy. And while learning His message, I find it best exemplified in women. Strong, beautiful, opinionated women. Flawed women, damaged women, real women who try every day to do the decent thing.

I find my closest friends with gay men because I was born to be a gay man. Hard to explain. But the women have drawn me to themselves because of similarity of experience, of hormonal fluxes, of the sisters-beneath-the-skin kinship that trumps in many ways my attitudinal kinship with gay men.

I love several, Ginny, Jaryn, Paula, Adrianne, Anna, Marlena, Lori -- for an abundance of reasons, but mostly because we “get” one another. I don’t need to approve or disapprove. Nor them to me. We grok one another.

I didn’t expect to love Ruth. Nor was there any good road map to loving Ruth. She married, as a second wife, My First Love. In that role, she was (before meeting, simply by situation) something of a speed bump between me and My First Love on second (or third, or whatever) acquaintance. I wanted to believe my first impression prior to meeting. I wanted to believe that she was hopelessly codependent, a lamprey, an obstacle to my search for union with My First Love whom I, for one brief shining moment, hoped would be My Lifetime Love. I hung on negative things reported. I compared myself, for better or for worse. I was thinner but not as competent, I was more lovely, but not as allied with the commonplace of the life of My First Love.

I gave it all up to God years ago, and then met Ruth. She had no reason to love me either. I was some mystery someone newly appeared. I probably was vaguely threatening, even though I had fought and paid a quarter of a million dollars to deflect any knowledge of just how threatening. (You either know that history or you don’t.) I appeared in her life well past any point of actual threat, and though was terrified, I don’t know what she thought.

I loved her. Pure D loved her. She is smart, funny, insightful, deeply caring, and the best helpmeet I could imagine for My First Love. If I followed the words of My Buddy Jesus, and looked for what was the best for those I loved, I could not have possibly imagined anyone more perfect to make MFL’s life complete and fulfilled. She was a loving mother to his children from his first marriage, an artistic partner, she smoothed over the rough patches left by MFL’s social awkwardnesses, she loved to cook as much as I did and understood the connections made by the table, and she worked like a plow mule on their farm.

Over the last few years, something odd happened, as I came to know her better, I came to love her beyond the role she played for MFL, but just in who she is, standing naked before God, I think I admire her more and would hope more for her better opinion, than that of MFL. I can’t explain this.

The last year has been awful for her. Breast cancer, a mastectomy, and within weeks, the death of a stepson. She stands tall, bowed, bloodied, not unmoved by these tragedies, but still very much herself. And she wanted something from me when last we met. I was humbled that she thought I had anything to give. She wanted me to be a better friend to her husband, my MFL, so that he could express to me the horrors of the past year, in ways he could not express to her.

Now that’s class.

I have heard that the cancer has returned. I can barely stand this further tragedy. Before this year, my grief would have been primarily for MFL. Now he’s secondary. I grieve for her health because I love her for whom she is and I don’t want to lose her. She is gifted, a shining ethical light, a quiet source of softness in a hard world for everyone who knows her.

I ask your prayers for her healing. Please don’t let the world be a poorer place without her.

It’s 9:08 pm, PST, February 22, 2009. My calendar marks the day as Washington’s Birthday. For my mother and her second husband, it marked an anniversary. “George would have wanted it this way,” they used to say to each other, when they used to be in love, exchanging sly looks.

The last Sunday in February (barring leap year) is a sacred day on my calendar, calculated not by date, but by day, lunar cycles, and a hearty dose of glitz for 81 years. Like Easter, on this variable date, the faithful gather in the main cathedral. Recently that cathedral has been the Kodak Center, but in days of yore it was the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, the Pantages, Grauman’s Chinese, Dorothy Chandler Pavillion, and notably, the Shrine. Smaller gatherings at smaller shrines celebrate this date in homes around the world.

Being a small “c” christian, I think that Jesus would understand why Oscar Night is a holy time for me. We all have to honor the rituals of our clan. I was born to two Z-Grade actors. Neither was famous to more than a small group of small people at any point in their careers. I’ve written about my wonderful dad, and my beloved godfather, Hal. Each has a small listing at imbd.com, the Bible of my people. That’s sort of like being Enoch, or Abel -- when Moses and Abraham were strutting front and center before the camera, Enoch and Abel were girding their loins or waving prayer shawls in the background. They get a verse or two before the cutaway to a burning bush.

I haven’t written about my mother’s role, she was sort of a Sarah -- wife of Abraham (and also his half-sister -- things were different then, look at Egyptian dynasties), at least in my little dynasty of chosen people. Sarah got things done. Even as an older woman, she had enough glam to give birth to the entire Judeo-Christian faith. Mom had me, which makes her pretty darn important in my book. At the ripe old age of 26, she ended her career for the sake of the continuation of her line. She doesn’t even get a mention in imbd.com.

But glamorous? Oh my God. At 18, in 1950, she walked into a theater troupe, soon to be profiled in Life Magazine as a sort of artistic commune bubbling with youthful talent, a daring experiment called the Orchard Gables Theater. Glowing with virginal health and beauty, she carried her bags up the walkway as my father-to-be first spied her and told his future best man, “I like THAT.” In reperatory theater, she and her fellows played Ben Johnson one night and the latest Broadway comedy the next. She and my father married, played theaters small and smaller throughout Southern California and New York, scraping by with jobs in munitions plants, furniture stores, Hostess Bakery factories and Lockheed. But at night, oh, the glamour.

Mom’s greatest fame may have been as the hostess of her own TV talk show. Step aside, ladies of the View, before there was Rosie or Ellen or Baba Wawa, there was Penny Nichols -- a name the producers thought cute -- the Queen of the San Joaquin. Valley, that is. The central California broadcast signal faded just before the big markets of San Francisco or LA. For a year, daily at noon, Mom charmed men wearing John Deere caps explaining cotton harvesting and home economists describing that year’s winning recipe featuring marshmallow fluff. She had fan mail and stalkers and all the glamour fame brings to the sexiest woman in Tulare.

She and my dad took their fame back to Glendale and spent a few years as the stars of the Hideaway Theater, emoting their heart out in front of painted cardboard sets in “Light Up The Sky,” “Jenny Kissed Me,” “Petticoat Fever,” and other light fare of the early and mid-50’s. The Hideaway was around the corner from a little saloon called Nick’s (Nicky’s?) who regularly advertised in the Hideaway’s programs and served as the after-show retreat, the Sardi‘s of Glendale. One of my earliest memories is my mother bringing me there as a babe in arms after the show and Nick, the starstruck owner, foundering for a gift for the kidlet. He gave me with great ceremony a handful of tinseled short bar straws bound with a rubber band. I treasured it for years as my personal Oscar, withdrawing one and only one glittering straw on my birthday to sip my milk.

Another earliest memory is standing in my crib, pre-verbal, at night, staring into the wedge of light from the hallway, shaking the bars as hard as my pudgy arms could shake, when I heard Mom return from the Hideaway to relieve the babysitter. Mom tells me now that my first sentence was on a night like that, when hearing the racket and rushing into the room, I hissed to her, “Ma-ma no-no bye-bye!” That infant pique struck her to the core, and she never acted on stage or screen again.

Everyone else in our little tribe continued chasing the tinsel. There were divorces, remarriages, I grew, and hosted the best dress-up parties of all my peers out of Mom’s costume trunks. The gown she wore starring in “Anastasia” was cut down for a Gone With The Wind hoop skirt for my Halloween costume. Her fur stole from some arch Noel Coward role, which she swore was made of squirrel bellies at best, graced my freckled shoulders when I needed to class up flannel nightgowns.

Years later, the original Broadway cast of Chorus Line took up permanent rotation on both my mother’s and my turntable. “What I Did For Love.” Mom would listen to the lyrics and nod. “That’s it, that’s why we did it… it wasn’t for fame, or stardom, though of course we wanted that too… we did it for love.”

I got closer to real, current Hollywood through my father, and godfather, as they continued to work in horrible drive-in films and bit parts on TV. I can chart my six degrees of Kevin Bacon to just about anyone through them, from Elvis to Kevin himself. I spent many of my “daddy weekends” seething in teenaged angst on movie sets, flirting with brainless but hunky stuntmen who debated with themselves the punishment for statutory rape, or worse, the disapproval of my father, whom everyone loved.

But from my mother, I got to appreciate the art of the thing. Somehow, she stayed on stage in her heart. She never lost her keen sense for a brilliant portrayal, for the history of this thing called Hollywood, for the magic and message to the world captured in celluloid. She handed me the best biographies, from the whimsical charm of David Niven to the raunchy honesty of Shirley known as Shelley (Winters). Through her off-hand tutelage and my geeky absorption in her coffee table books about Old Hollywood, I was the only girl in the 4^th grade conversant in matters D.W. Griffith, Garbo, Goldwyn. At her knee, I knew that the pretty little girl who sang “Over The Rainbow” was the same woman who I heard nightly from the living room speakers singing Live From Carnegie Hall, and was addicted to pills from her first menses courtesy of Louis B. Mayer. I may have been the only pre-teen in the world who knew in 1965 that the star of Pillow Talk was gay. I knew, because Mom and she were classmates in Burbank the year before she was signed to a contract, that Debbie Reynolds was an idiot, but worked her ass off.

My friend Houston says I was born in a trunk. I don’t know if that’s quite true. It felt more like I was born into a very small town in the middle of a metropolis. Everyone knew everyone, or at least their agent. I didn’t feel special, and I envied the kids at school who could drag their dad the cop in for “Career Day.” Who would believe my father was an actor, my mother an actress? No one had ever heard of them, so they didn’t exist.

The Oscars, though, my God the Oscars. It was the annual recognition of my very small town. There was a certain genteel handicapping of the nominees at home, and the black-and-white show on our Zenith rabbit-ear set seemed like a snowy visitation of distant relatives. I’d strain to hear Bob Hope over the background backchat between my parents from the sofa. Rarely had I seen the more mature movies nominated, of course, unless it was The Sound of Music. But this MATTERED. This was the tangible coin of the realm of the very small town I glimpsed.

By the time I was in high school, and had the requisite gay friend, Steve, he and I lived and breathed Oscars. This was the ‘70’s, and movies had changed. My mother still appreciated a heart-stopping performance, and she didn’t mind when George C. Scott declined the honor. On the other hand, she hooted at Marlon Brando’s copycat refusal, when he sent Sacheem Littlefeather (born Maria Cruz in Salinas, California) to accept his Oscar and do the PC thing. She loved Cher’s “fuck you” outrageousness and G-strings. But she missed the glamour. The 70’s were hard on glamour, not that Steve and I minded. We loved the fact that Jane Fonda had snot running out of her nose when she wept in Klute, winning Best Actress. Steve and I painted all 20 of our collective fingernails green (“Divine decadence, darling,”) in support of Liza Minnelli in Cabaret (which we had seen eight times).

When I was in college and married (ex #1, and a prince of a fellow), my then husband worked for a short-lived special effects studio, mostly for TV commercial production. I still see the names of his co-workers in credits, and my little village continues. Anyway, at Mid-Ocean Motion Pictures, I was unimpressed as I breezed past the Clios proudly lined up in the reception area on my way to the Friday night screening of weeklies with hubby. Clios? We don’t need no stinkin’ Clios. They aren’t Oscars. There was, of course, the Oscar pool, which hubby and I won two years in a row, based on my memory of past Oscar handicapping. Hubby was also born to the tribe; his grandfather had been head of props for Warners. We went through the list every year, knowing that a comeback trumped a good performance, death trumped all, but one had to factor in sentiment when a past loser could win on an indifferent performance based on a prior body of work. We also aced the tricky smaller categories, because it was easy to tell on title alone whether a documentary was about the Holocaust and therefore blessed.

Oscar Day, which used to be Mondays (traditionally, because it was a “dark night” for those working in theaters) were a half-day at LA office jobs, such as my first lawyer work in Beverly Hills and downtown LA. When in BH, I had seen the lesser nominees shop for dresses on Rodeo, next to our office, and in LA, the venue was five blocks away and you had to leave by noon to avoid limo gridlock hell. Again, we were all subject to the rituals of the little tribe.

When I transplanted to San Francisco in the mid-‘80’s and worked at a stuffy gray-flannel law firm, I suffered the worst culture shock of my move the week before the Oscars. We had done the office pool for the World Series and the Superbowl. I asked around the lunchroom for the Oscar pool. I knew I could win. The ridicule and rolling of the eyes I invited! “Oh, Lisa, the Oscars…. You are SO LA…” Along with my lavender silk “LA Law” skirt suit (the only female partner was assigned to tell me such flamboyance would NOT fly in San Francisco), this was further evidence that I was way, way too Hollywood for their chilly SF vibe. It’s a shock to Angeleans how far San Francisco will stretch the 400 mile distance between the cities in their one-sided rivalry with the rude sister city in the south.

I bristled. Who the hell were they to tell me I was declassee? These yokels, I knew, went home and watched the show, ogled the starlets, and were envious of the glamour of my home village. Fuck them.

The next year, I held my first Oscar Party. It was a modest gathering of ten or twelve friends, with hot dogs and Raisinettes and popcorn. It was ironic, it had to be ironic in San Francisco. By that time, I was ironic, too. We all knew the show was a bore, a bomb, but a traffic accident from which we could not avert our eyes. Which busty ingénue would suddenly, mid-speech, declare her love for the Dali Lama? When would a supporting actor do one-armed push-ups? It was like watching aboriginal dances, but I loved it, and my love was infectious. It allowed all the hipper-than-thou San Franciscans to come out of the closet and in a collective, supportive environment, share the silliness, the glitz, the glamour. I was the Harvey Milk of the Oscars. I was their ambassador from the little town, the bent, incestuous little village. I had the currency.

For the next 14 years, missing only the year my father died, I hosted an Oscar Party of ever-increasing elaboration and insanity, growing to 50 or more guests. It doesn’t sound radical now. This was before Vanity Fair or Elton John had Oscar Parties. By the third year, I had televisions, scrounged from friends or bought second hand, in every room including the bathrooms. When I lived in a loft, I rented what was then an obscenely huge projection television for the main living area, with of course back-up screens from every angle. The invitations became more ornate, one year requiring a reinforced mailing tube. From the beginning, there was a contest, and the ballot/list of nominees became a gag-writer’s collaboration of Hollywood in-jokes about the category (“Sound Editing” -- who cares???) or nominee (Anthony “Where Are My Fava Beans?” Hopkins -- or daringly, Jodie “Where The Girls Are” Foster). We had nametags, not of our own names, but of the residents past and present of my former little town, Clark Gable or more obscurely, William Desmond Taylor. Some years there were movie themes -- Casablanca or La Dolce Vita -- with costumes. Sheets of shelf paper were pinned to walls inviting nominations for our own categories -- worst hair or toupee, most obviously medicated, worst dress, best use of plastic surgery. The fabulous prize for the contest started with a modest used book about Hollywood and became a panoply of booby prizes awarded for the least successful predictions (an Oscar-statuette keychain) to an authentic vintage Casablanca poster for winners.

Tribal drumbeat: A booby prize winner one year was a friend of Julie Christie. He gave her the mini-Oscar keychain. The next year she was nominated, and lost. He called her the next day and said, “Good morning, loser.” She said, in that wonderful upper-crust accent, “Fuck you, I have my Oscar” and sent him a photo of her kissing the little man. I have a copy, somewhere.

As an unreformed foodie, I collected party recipes all year. I’d copy Wolfgang Puck caviar pizzas, wrap brie in puff pastry, ressurrect menus from famous Hollywood parties of the ‘40’s. Michael and Adrianne, indefatigable guests of parties past, bribed the local chocolatier who supplied miniature gold-leafed dark chocolate Oscars for the Producer’s Ball and presented me with a dozen contraband candies. I then continued to blackmail the source for years. One broke year, when I was still paying off my wedding the previous October, friends came to the rescue with wonderful appetizers and main courses while I supplied the usual glut of elaborate desserts.

My second husband, another small-fry member of the tribe by reason of screenwriting hack horror movies, came into the annual religious frenzy of Oscar and after a year or two of shock and awe, entered into the fray with even more invention and creativity, taking time off from work to set up decorations that would stagger a top-name set designer, or building a scale model of the Titanic for me to wear on my head as I greeted guests. Friends began asking me about the party, the potential nominees, starting the previous Thanksgiving.

As you might imagine, this was a bipolar girl’s dream. I could count on a manic upswing in mid-winter to carry me through the sleepless nights before the party, gilding invitations, pureeing salmon mousse and roasting fois gras in brandy while draping chandeliers in silk or creating orchid forests. Oscar night was High Holy night. I was house-proud, husband-proud, party-proud, friend-proud, proud to bursting of the currency given to me from my family, my mother, the glamour gelt.

One of the best parties was the year I wore my mother’s gold-lame Balanciaga dress with the molded tits and hips, that she had worn to the Oscars in the early 1960’s. For some reason, she and my stepfather were invited by a second-tier Hollywood agent to the ceremonies, then held at the Shrine Auditorium, and sat well up in the balcony, shielded from anything important by fixed cameras on cranes. “I’ve never been so bored in my life,” she told me later. I didn’t care, I was eight years old and she dripped gold tinsel gorgeousness as I watched her leave and return. The dress hung in her closet for years, but it didn’t need the hanger. It could have stood in the corner like a suit of armor. I was thrilled to the bone to be able to wear my tribal colors -- the color being as gold as the little man himself -- to my new country. It was unnerving, though, to turn to one side and have to wait for the dress to follow a second later.

In 2004, the year the bottom of my life fell out, it was obvious by the time the nominations were announced in January that there would be no party that year. My second marriage was all over but the shouting, the house was torn up for remodeling prior to sale, my glamour had turned to dust. I remembered when my mother sang along with “A Chorus Line.” It was what I did for love. Can’t regret, can’t forget. Melodramatic? You forget my roots. Fuck it. Knockers up, on to the next.

A former coworker, and best friend of a best friend, asked me kindly for the honor of hosting the party that year. I handed her the Oscar mantle with no regrets. I dug out all my old party decorations, the mock Oscar statues, the vintage clap boards, the dressing room stars, the tinsel. My future ex brought trunkloads of the stuff and set up all our reserve televisions in her house. He stayed many hours there, adjusting the fine tuning and draping borrowed glamour all over her flat. The week before her party, his volunteer enthusiasm kept him there until the wee hours. Despite our estrangement, we went to the party together. It gave me the opportunity to play the contest, a game I had forfeited to the field the years I was a hostess. As a sop to my ancestry, I came in the running and won a DVD of Annie Hall. The hostess awarded it prettily. It wasn’t the party I’d throw -- deli potato salad? -- but I recognized the passing of the torch philosophically.

Until a few weeks later, when I realized that the hostess had borrowed not just tinsel and televisions, but my husband’s straying prick. Maybe you have to have experienced something similar to understand the level of humiliation of looking back, knowing everyone else knew, snickering behind their hands. Or at least thinking that was the case. The role of stupid wife, oblivious. I was not born to that role. I played the madcap heiress, dashing into the 1930’s white-on-white Cecil Gibbons set with a pith helmet and net, inviting everyone on safari, with a musical laugh. I was Sally Bowles. I was Auntie Mame. No fucking way was I a weeping Joan Crawford ‘s Mildred Pierce, or worse, Debbie Reynolds with a diaper pin on her shoulder, bearing up bravely as Liz stole Eddie. Actually, my mother understood. By that time, she had divorced her straying husband who loved to take her arm at parties to introduce her to his mistress. Maybe I was born to the role. I played it a little differently, but my outrage, born of shame, was the same.

I moved to My Little Town shortly thereafter. There is no reason to have an Oscar Party here. My Little Town doesn’t get irony. There is no gay community to get camp, either. It’s close enough to LA, and lacking enough in its own glamour, to slaver unashamedly over the Oscars, though it has no fine appreciation of the ceremonies. This is a town that wishes High School Musical was nominated for Best Picture. That fills the multiplex screenings of Paul Blart: Mall Cop while Milk and Frost/Nixon are empty except for the dozy seniors taking advantage of bargain matinees.

For the last few years, I’ve avoided all pre-Oscar frenzy and watched the increasingly lackluster showings with one eye, if at all.

Last week, on about Tuesday or Wednesday, I fell victim to the blues. Not a crippling, suicidal depression, thank God the meds seem to keep me clear of those, now. But it was bad enough to significantly cut into my energy, throw me off my diet, lead me to bed early and up late. Life had, as it has before, shifted to grainy black-and-white, instead of my beachside Technicolor. These things happen without cause and now I know to wait them out like a cold or flu. After sniveling to my shrink about it on Friday, we went on to other topics and she mentioned that Sunday was the Oscars. She had an inkling that they were important to me and was fishing for a reaction. A visible 100-watt light bulb appeared over my astonished face. Of course. Anniversaries are important to depressives, if you didn’t know. Part of a bipolar depression is simply missing the mania. Or revisiting past low points. The Oscars were both. If I were still in San Francisco, leading my old life, I would have been in high gear for the party from Wednesday onwards. And then the Oscars marked my most horrific fall. It was my Alpha and Omega, my gold and my hemlock. And I was now living with my mother, the source of my Hollywood faith, the last remnant of my village, the Queen in exile.

Within a few hours of figuring that out, the blues lifted. Well, what the hell. I’d watch. I’d even make a low-key party for the two of us. Chips and guacamole. A nice old-school pot roast. No gilded chocolates or caviar pizza, but a bit of an event. I couldn’t quite see Hugh Jackman as host, but he was easier on the eyes than, say, Whoopi.

It was. The. Best. Oscars. Ever. (Or at least since 1993, Billy Crystal‘s apotheosis.)

I don’t know who produced it, but they got it right. It was young, hip, but somehow more sincere. Having prior winners give tribute to the nominees was moving. African and taiko drummers in the crowd for the Best Song medley -- different, interesting, interactive. A musical tribute to movie musicals -- usually the bane of even the worst broadcasts, choreographed by a third-rate Laker Girl -- that was sexy and fast and brilliant. Well of course, they got Baz Luhrmann, Mr. Moulon Rouge to stage it. Jackman did not fall into the mistake of all hosts after Billy Crystal and try to be Billy Crystal, he was himself, a consummate song-and-dance man of great charm. There was even an inside joke (for animators, another former tribe of mine) about Disney and Pixar. Hollywood was allowed to shine and do what it does best, now, in 2009, and for once forgot to be tacky. I loved it. Mom loved it. The little gold man shone bright and we shared the moment.

About time. About time the show of shows recovered from its bad-retro swoon. About time I did, too.

Here’s to my people on this holy day. Here’s to Mom, the Queen of the San Joaquin. Here’s to glamour.