PRAISE FOR ALWAYS CRASHING IN THE SAME CAR “Matthew Specktor’s Always Crashing in the Same Car is going on the shelf with Play It as It Lays and The Big Sleep and my other favorite books about LA. I’m not sure what it is. A memoir-essay grafted onto a psycho-geographic travelogue of the weirdest town to be from? All I know is I couldn’t stop reading it.” — JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN, author of Pulphead “Haunting, powerful, riveting, unforgettable—I could go on (and on) about Matthew Specktor’s astounding new book about failure, writing, Los Angeles, and the movies. With scholarly rigor and tenderhearted sympathy, Specktor excavates the lives of artists forgotten (Carole Eastman, Eleanor Perry), underappreciated (Thomas McGuane, Hal Ashby), and notorious (Warren Zevon, Michael Cimino), while always circling back to his own benighted Hollywood upbringing. This is an angry, sad, but always somehow joyful book about not hitting it big, and I’ve never read anything quite like it.” — TOM BISSELL, author of Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation “In Hollywood, according to Brecht’s famous formulation, there was no need of heaven and hell; the presence of heaven alone served the unsuccessful as hell. But Los Angeles has always been full of commuters on the congested freeway between both camps. They are the subject of Matthew Specktor’s continuously absorbing and revealing book, itself nestling in the fruitful terrain between memoir and criticism.” — GEOFF DYER, author of Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence PRAISE FOR AMERICAN DREAM MACHINE “Sprawling, atmospheric . [American Dream Machine has] a feline watchfulness and a poetic sensibility that echoes Bellow’s and Updike’s prose rhythms along with their voracious, exuberant intelligence.” — THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW “Specktor’s book deserves a special space in the LA canon, somewhere looking up at Pynchon and Chandler. Even as the narrator searches through his past to uncover the truth about his family, the author is searching, too.” — LA WEEKLY “Specktor’s prose alone is enough to lure you in: it’s sharply observed and nimble, like a more mischievous cousin of John Cheever, and his characters are wonderfully and deeply complicated, wounded and secretive.” — THE MILLIONS “Richly engaging . Specktor sees his Hollywood characters as three-dimensional and very human.” — SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE “With coolness and precision, Specktor comes across as a West Coast Saul Bellow in this sweeping narrative, but his energetic, pop-infused prose is markedly his own.” — BOOKLIST “Specktor does for LA what Hemingway did for Paris and what Hunter S. Thompson did for Las Vegas: create a character that lives and breathes a city. Like hotels in Vegas, we see characters rise, grow dusty, and collapse.” — THE DAILY BEAST “Specktor’s great achievement is to make familiar territory original, the Hollywood novel born anew. It’s bold, weird, and unforgettable, as startling as a poke in the eye.” — THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH MAGAZINE ALWAY CRA HING IN THE AME CAR Copyright © 2021 by Matthew Specktor All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For in- formation, contact Tin House, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210. Published by Tin House, Portland, Oregon Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Specktor, Matthew, author. Title: Always crashing in the same car : on art, crisis & Los Angeles, California / Matthew Specktor. Description: Portland, Oregon : Tin House, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2020057479 | ISBN 9781951142629 (paperback) | ISBN 9781951142636 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Specktor, Matthew. | Authors, American—Biography. | Los Angeles (Calif.)—History—20th century—Biography. | Los Angeles (Calif.)—Intellectual life—20th century. Classification: LCC PS3619.P437 Z46 2021 | DDC 813/.6 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057479 First US Edition 2021 Printed in the USA Interior design by Jakob Vala www.tinhouse.com For K, whose life was beautiful anyway I MONKEYBITCH . 1 Introduction II POLI H TAR . 27 Eleanor Perry and Frank Perry III THE INTERVAL . 77 Carole Ea tman IV THE LOWE T MOMENT OF YOUR LIFE . 129 Thoma McGuane V QUA IMODO PLAY HER ELF . 175 Tue day Weld VI THE CADAVER AND THE EARCH . 215 Warren Zevon VII KING , KILLING , ETC. 259 Hal A hby and Michael Cimino VIII THE AGE OF CRIME . 307 Renata Adler ENDNOTE . 345 WORK . 362 LI T OF ILLU TRATION . 374 KEY ADDRE E . 376 ACKNOWLEDGMENT . 377 One life was never quite enough for what I had in mind. —SEYMOUR KRIM, “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business” I These are the picture people. Do not blame them too much. —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, Notebooks THERE’ A CERTAIN sort of person one sees all over Los Angeles, the kind you’d rather stare at, perhaps, than know. These people—you’ve seen them too—are elegant, compact, and possessed of a bland perfection, a vegetable grace. You barely notice them, not because they aren’t visually striking— on the contrary—but because they seem to lack credible flaws. Their bone structure, their carefully tended hair and stubble, their laughter. If you were the type who was inclined to judge such things, a casting agent or just a garden-variety asshole, you’d probably be able to tell what was which and who was most likely to succeed on the basis of these attri- butes (for these people are almost all, in one sense or another, actors), but me? All my life I’ve viewed such specimens with confusion. Gliding past in their cars, hanging on the terraces and patios of outdoor cafés, hunched over laptops, scowl- ing, in the back booths of restaurants or lolling—in pairs, in quartets—drinking green juice, drinking matcha tea or iced cortados, giving off the air, always, always, always, of ease, of success, of industry, of hope, of readiness, of the absence (see the yoga mat, the keys, the sunglasses, the well-thumbed copy 4 of Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares, or Save the Cat!) of all vis- ible signs of difficulty. Such people once filled me with envy: the sad pangs of an ugly duckling sentenced to waddle among them. Later, the feelings they stirred were ones of resentment, and competition. But it is only recently, after a long struggle with my own ideas of “success” and what these people might be aiming toward, that I have begun to pity them. To look at them now feels like looking at a photograph of soldiers headed to war, or one of those spammy internet pages that purport to show images taken on the precipice of calamity: the instant before the shark bites or the bear lunges, or the foot slips fatally from the ledge. This morning, I slalomed through a crowd of them on my way to get coffee, my hips brushing up against their shoulders, glancing down at their sunstruck, symmetrical, self-enclosed faces, the narcissistic flowers of Beverly Boulevard, innocent, every last one, of what wind was coming to destroy them. By the time I made it back to my car? I was in tears. Some time ago (“in my younger and more vulnerable years”), I suffered a kind of crash. “Suffered” may be a grand and -he roic word for it, considering the quantities of a more profound misery in the world, but, nevertheless. I found myself loose, at large within the city where I’d grown up, from which I’d departed in a nervous panic at eighteen, and to which I’d only recently returned. Hollywood. Los Angeles contains so many sub-quadrants, most of them having nothing in particular to 5 do with the movies, but “Hollywood”—which is as much a no- tion as it is a neighborhood, one that permeates the actual city like a gas—is where I’m from. My childhood home may have sat in Santa Monica, a sleepy suburb by the sea, but my fam- ily resided in Hollywood as surely as anyone ever has. Which place is to many folks still a metonym, a symbol of all that is shiny and empty and attractive and awful in American life, all that is stupid and all that is—we can’t help it—irresistible to us, pulling as it does with the hopeful energy of sex. To me, grow- ing up, this city had been the precise opposite: a glamourless desert, a hall of mirrors where I was unable to escape my own unfortunate reflection. All these roads and avenues running nowhere beneath the green palms, leading me back inexorably to my own perceived limitations. Surely there was something the matter with me. How could I dislike my own hometown so much? I’d ejected myself with all the force of a hairball, fled east to college in Massachusetts, west to San Francisco, then east again to New York City. I’d been elsewhere for a long, long time, and now that I was home, probing along the margins of my native place the way you would at an abscessed tooth, with tenderness and care and a gnawing fascination . I fell in love, though to this day I cannot quite say with what. Maybe it was just the thing about Los Angeles that claims everybody, even- tually: weather, buildings, loveliness, light. Or maybe, I’d fooled myself again. Having expatriated myself from the city for so long, and having insulated myself for a while by marriage, one that had recently ended, I was coming to it now as an outsider, and for the same reason so many do: as a sucker, hoping against some very steep odds for “success.” 6 “I’ll take it.” My voice echoed sharply off the walls of a small but empty room, the acoustics of which—wood floors, high ceiling—made it feel slightly larger: just big enough that I might not feel for a while the potential for confinement.