Episodes

HOLLYWOOD & MINE — There are millions of stories here in Tinseltown. Let me read you this one about BILLIE and her meteoric rise from babysitter to Hollywood Studio Chief and what happened next...

HOLLYWOOD & MINE — There are millions of stories here in Tinseltown. Let me read you this one about BILLIE and her meteoric rise from babysitter to Hollywood Studio Chief and what happened next...

It’s not common knowledge, but most leading men are short. They have big heads in relation to their slight bodies, large symmetrical features, especially eyes, and straight expertly manscaped brows. They photograph well. The camera loves them and in order to make them appear tall in the frame they often emote perched up on a flat wooden platform called an apple box, a leftover term from the silent era when California’s main export was produce and anything on hand — like a shipping crate — was in...

It’s amazing in L.A., how often the very early morning brings clarity. It’s true. The low angle of the sun, the freshly brewed coffee, the smell of moist earth and eucalyptus after the sprinklers had gone off. In my gullible twenties — after the birth of my son — it came to my attention that my husband was in the midst of inviting a succession of long legged lady-girls out to restaurants while I let my ends split and my waist expand. I assumed, no, let’s say I trusted, that my husband was engage...

I called my mom. Mother Lydia was the antithesis of everyone I knew in Hollywood. If I couldn’t get absolution I knew calling her would result in a strong dose of disapproval, an advised course correction, and a grudging glimmer of hope. First of all, as a school superintendent, she didn’t approve of me dropping out of college, she didn’t approve of my lifestyle; and she certainly didn’t approve of my soon to be ex-husband who she called a dissolute charmer. She often mentioned he had bad blood ...

I scanned the editing room to see if there was a physical tell for an epiphany moment. Two young men in their early twenties, my classmates, were hunched down in a darkened cubicle, stubble across their chins, staring at the projection screen. The only thing on their horizon was their unfolding masterpiece. It must have been around five o’clock. The editing room was nearly silent. The population of campus was thinning out in anticipation of altered states and misadventures. At a maternal 29 I fe...

Some people apply battle strategy to film making. Many directors are able to extemporize on Sun Tzu’s thirteen principals of war. I wasn’t very familiar with eastern philosophy, even though Cooper Daniels had sent me to the Bodhi Tree bookstore on Melrose for a stack of treatises in vogue with Disney suits and CAA foot soldiers, but half of my family was Italian and I did remember distinctly the words of Machiavelli. “To know in war how to recognize an opportunity and seize it is better than any...

We were in pre-production for months, which is otherwise known as “development.” It’s mostly an accounting trick, cinema semantics as some impressive dollar deals are tied to certain points in the film schedule, like the huge fees that are handed out the first day of principal photography.

Shooting began. Patsy Morris, checking in one afternoon as the crew broke for lunch cautioned me. “Remember, movies are like high school with a paycheck. The same juvenile behavior and more cliques than you can keep track of.”

“You know my mom and dad came out to visit me when I was on that first movie. I took them to set, Grauman’s Chinese, Max Factor’s. We looked at every little bitty star on Hollywood Boulevard and had hot fudge sundaes at C.C. Brown’s. The day they came to see me at work, oh my. Cooper had this girl hangin’ around wearing some kind of white-bra, kind a short-playsuit thing with a black leather jacket on top and ankle high stiletto boots. Said he wanted to get her a line so she could get Taft-Hartl...

There are definitely seasons in California, whatever anyone says to the contrary. In the winter the smog lifts. The daytime skies are a blue that delights my New England soul. At night the lights that sprawl from the San Gabriel Mountains to the sea glow against a heavenly dome of deep Mediterranean blue. People wear sweaters. In 1991 when I turned thirty the film I had worked on for over a year was released. It got critical acclaim over Thanksgiving weekend (a good omen for the Oscars) and as C...

There is a kind of courtship that goes on between producer and director, a kind of wooing. The producer holds the means of movie making (money) and the director, if they’re any good, provides the vision. There’s a honeymoon period, and often an inevitable falling out. It was a form of sexual sublimation, but I thought it would do; sex, power, creativity, industry — yes, a muddle that would have to be sorted out in time, and it was the only muddle I had going. While we went through the motions, ...

Unlike Mr. Booker, Bob Brown was not a man who, he liked to say, “Waded through god damn minutia,” especially the finer points of male versus female behavior. Bob Brown tended to set goals and chart practical points to achieve them. He thought of himself as an integral, fundamental, part of the clockwork that regularly ticked out the American dream. He was a big picture kind of guy. His mother had been an R.N., his father sold tires. When his big brother, Manny, got him a job in the mailroom at ...

At the onset of our thirties we, the former nannies, while ascending the career ladder, found our personal lives lagging. Polly found her male peers juvenile – emotionally immature and adolescent in their delight at attaining useless things. Darla made a three year, nine million dollar TV development deal and found all her male dinner companions, and prospective bedmates, really weren’t so very interested in her, but in her willingness to read their scripts and laugh at their desperate jokes. Ja...

At the moment I’m looking at an old menu from a restaurant called the Brown Derby. On its cover is an imaginary map of Los Angeles with Hollywood at its center. It’s scattered with cartoon depictions of movie cameras, musical notes winging out of the Hollywood Bowl, crooners broadcasting from NBC Radio Studios, and roadsters zipping down Franklin Avenue. It’s an extremely impressionistic guide to L.A. This vast city (really a collection of towns) tends to be represented in its spatial relation...

“I recorded that section about the riots of ’92 one week before the May-June protests in 2020. Pandemic, economic collapse, police brutality… Three horsemen of the apocalypse are quite enough, thank you.” *** That’s a quote from the novel I’m podcasting, you can listen at the end of post. Lena Horne’s quote is the chapter heading. Ms. Horne had plenty to be angry about. Her father took a powder when she was three. Her suffragette mother disapproved of her and left her in the care of her grandp...

And thus, Anne Brown and her roommate, Tatiana Schneider were dispatched to a TV star’s mountain top domicile. They felt charged with responsibility and a certain kind of contempt for their elders’ unmanageable peccadilloes, “God, how gross,” was a phrase they bandied about between them. The star’s property was gated. Anne drove her tiny blue Civic up winding, endless, Mulholland to the gate and keyed the intercom as I had instructed her. It was two in the afternoon. The hot sun was dappled and ...

I’m feeling celebratory, so there will be three chapters of Hollywood & Mine going up this weekend. This is episode 18 (chapter 16, for those of you keeping track) and it starts with a quote from good old Greta Garbo: If only those who dream about Hollywood knew how difficult it all is. During the era in which I was climbing the greasy pole there were no smartphones, email was a few years in the future, and executives carried fat, expensively bound, loose-leaf notebooks in which they memorializ...

There’s nothing a man can do, that I can’t do better and in heels. So said Ginger Rogers, and thus begins chapter 17. There are so many myths on which the reality of Hollywood is based. Some are funny and fun, some are sad, and some are desperate. I knew that success, no matter how it came, was the one thing everyone remembered. Consider this, around the time I had become a producer so had a young fellow that happened to have a way with finicky animals. Titans of the industry relied on him to r...

Chapter 18 begins with a quote from Bette Davis: I’d marry again if I found a man who had fifteen million dollars, would sign over half to me, and guarantee that he’d be dead within a year. On a Saturday following the first week of shooting, I woke, and for a few brief moments didn’t know how old I was, what house I was in, where my parents were, if I was married, or had a child; I was just Billie, waking. Light was streaming into the windows, and I felt buoyant, rising, free. I stretched. I fi...

Merle Oberon said that thing about Hollywood and one night stands. We’ll talk about her joy ride with David Niven later. Now we’re back to the story of Billie and chapter 19 — A film set is a constantly shifting sea. It’s usually crowded concentrated controlled chaos — until it’s not. The not, those lulls, are very deceptive. You might see a large number of crew members at the craft service table, the lead actor sitting down for a game of chess with the prop man, or the grips and electricians st...

Chapter 20, in which Billie travels to Vegas and comes to a seismic realization. I tended to think of sleep as something healing, freshening, and cleansing. I traced this somewhat peculiar notion to parental influence. I distinctly remembered – though I couldn’t have been more than four at the time — waddling after my mother one golden Saturday morning as Mom carefully demonstrated how to achieve “hospital corners,” the precise folding of sheet around mattress, the hands that most often held a s...

We are all the lead character in our personal narrative yet this bothered me. Behind the scenes was my forté, I wasn’t ready for a starring role, never had been. Why was that? And why couldn’t I stop thinking about myself in relation to Cooper? What also bothered me was that I was including him in a category usually known (at least in risk assessment circles) as an act of God, an unforeseen and unavoidable force of nature, and in that instant I decided to stay put, remembering a movie line that ...

I loved recording this chapter, it’s got Hollywood history, everlasting friendship, and of course some very strange goings-on… There we sat, the mogul’s daughter turned academic, the copywriter turned designer, the semi-profane raconteur turned show runner, the pragmatist turned legal advocate, and me; the nanny turned studio executive. It was late, the conversation was flowing, the scent of night-blooming vines hung in the air. There were altogether too many candles glowing on the coffee table...