The celebrated underground director who died by his own hand left behind only one testament to his own genius, the revered cult film My Sweet Dread, or so we thought. Writer David Thomson, who last year removed one veil from the memory of his friend Perk Cobb, this year drops another.
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When I offered my obituary thoughts on Perkins Cobb exactly one year ago in this magazine, it was with a rather weary reluctance. Over the years, I had determined not to write about Cobb. He had made it clear that he hoped I wouldn't--he showed every sign of wanting to vanish. It was only the provocation of his death last summer (that spectacular Utah suicide was a mysterious and signal urging), and the remorseless requests of Movieline editors that made me yield. And even as I wrote, I had my doubts. Indeed, there was an odd feeling of, as it were, auto-autopsy.
Still, I did want to give at least a nod of respect to that lost and golden age of the 1970s when difficult and private, but beautiful, films were made in America, films that stirred up the sediment of our souls and our nation. I don't mean just my friend Perk Cobb's one and only picture, the arresting My Sweet Dread. I mean Malick's Badlands, Penn's Night Moves, Toback's Fingers, Rafelson's The King of Marvin Gardens, and the movies of Monte Hellman, not to mention films that were more glorious at the box office but still somehow seemed aware of our darker secrets and felt mixed feelings of awe, pity and, yes, dread for them: The Godfather, The Long Goodbye, the first pictures of Scorsese, and even the inescapable Chinatown.
A lost age of marvels. And haven't attempts at sequels helped us see how completely the edgy moment has disappeared? Yes, I wanted to honor that decade of sultry mavericks by writing about one of its most elusive casualties, a filmmaker who lost faith in the medium, an obsessive who saw through his own excitement, a pioneer who covered his tracks.
There were some friendly remarks made about the April piece. One or two people who remembered Perk called to say it had been well worth doing. Of course, Movieline was blessed to discover that photographer Sandra Johnson had known Perk too, and had snapshots from over the years (though none of us in the circle can quite place the very pretty girl in the two Big Sur pictures). Younger readers complained that they couldn't find My Sweet Dread at their local video stores--as if those grim, threadbare parlors were reliable repositories of our film heritage!
At any event, the piece appeared, and passed away as pieces do. Then one night, three or four weeks later, as I was drowsily watching Point Blank, I got a phone call. The film was ending, and Lee Marvin was resolutely preferring not to appear one more time. At first I thought it was a phone ringing in his story, but it kept ringing. It was a little after 11. There was no introduction or prelude, just the intimate aggression of a woman's husky voice straight into my ear: "Did I ever know you? Did you so much as see me, apart from photography? You don't know enough about your precious Perkins Cobb to begin his story. I'm not going to talk to you. Hello... ?" And then, as I struggled for "Yes?" the phone rang off--it sounded as if it had been dropped back in place.
I hardly slept the rest of the night, alert for a follow-up call, trying to gauge the unstable mix of intelligence and nerviness I had heard so briefly. Was this what one is supposed to call a "crank"? (The concept seems less viable these days when one can hardly ask directions without meeting an unreliable narrator.) But how had the voice found me? And what did it mean that this woman had called me to insist she would not talk? It was all so emphatic and yet so vulnerable.
Some superior knowledge in the caller loomed over me. Had she known "my" Cobb in ways I could not dream of? This was likely. There had always been women hovering at the edge of Perk's shadow, liaisons that curtailed phone calls or poker games. There were times when Perk's number had changed--and I now wondered whether I might end up having to do the same if that jittery, unarguable voice roused me again at three or four, improving on nightmare. I remembered something Perk had told me about his Hollywood: "You reassure crazies. You stroke neurotics. You feed other people's bad habits. The lies are not just allowed--they're damn near expected. A few years of that and who's fit for human company? When you're lying, you see, there has to be a script, you need to be a character, so as to remember what to say. Nobody talks naturally anymore."
And I had added, "It could make a person give up on talking."
Perk nodded and grinned: "I tried that once and liked it fine. But then it began lending me a kind of magic. The less I said, the more they asked. Drove girls wild. Couldn't take it after a while. That's L.A., though. Gets to you some way, sooner or later."
The best part of another week elapsed, and I was forgetting the call when the phone rang again. This was a little after 10 on a bright, sun-wiped morning. A brisk secretarial voice asked for me and then said she had "Graziella Ortiz" on the line. I had mentioned Graziella in the piece--as one of Perk's famous lady friends. Yet, truth to tell, I knew very little about this woman apart from a montage of reckless yet imprecise press stories, a few remembered shots from Vogue and Elle of that stunned, staring face, and of course, the unfortunate Catalina incident. I wasn't entirely sure that Graziella Ortiz was alive still, let alone around.
"Mr. Thompson?" It was the same voice, albeit recast from late night unease into a tone more suited to fresh-air business.
"It's Thomson," I replied. "No 'p.'"
"Ah," she said. "Right." And there was a trifling laugh. Some people think a proper taste for detail is amusing and constipated.
"Look," she began again. "I am interested in having a piece done."
"A piece?"
"Uh-huh. I'm making a return, you see. And I love your stuff."
"Please," I protested. My heart was beating. Writers are such helpless idiots over praise--we never trust a word, especially the words we want most.
"No, really," she told me. How did I know she was grinning at her secretary?
"How did you like the Perkins Cobb article?" I thought I might as well take the lead.
"Did I see that one?" she asked the air. She could have been speaking to that droll secretary as the girl repaired her carmine lip gloss. "Anyway, I thought we should meet."
I knew this was a perilous opportunity, even if I couldn't tell whether to be warned or beguiled. I will do anything not to be afraid, or not to have it show. So I said, "Why not?" She gave me an address up above Sunset, and instructed me on how not to miss the concealed entrance. "Come around four," she said, "and we can swim."
My destination was a narrow, winding lane just below the Hollywood sign. The property was cloaked in flowering shrubs, so close to the city yet poised silently above it. The paneled door to the house stood ajar. The interior was Spanish with bare white walls and just a few pieces of outrageously sparse modern furniture. There was a painting on the wall, one of James Stagg's night scenes, with a yellow cab making a U-turn like a smear of mustard. Doors opened to the patio and an intimate oval pool graded in tiny tiles of every shade of blue and green. There was a gentle noise of swimming. But it was not Miss Ortiz in the water. Her Afghan hound--"Laura," I learned--was doing patient laps, her hair spread out like fine fronds, while Graziella, supple and thin, sat curled in a metal chair feeding herself blue corn chips with savage appetite.
You may be interested to know how the briefly fabled Ortiz looked after several years of rest. There is a photograph from the afternoon to satisfy your curiosity. Not that I had made the trip with a camera. Miss Ortiz had one, which, before anything could be said, she held out to me: "Here. Take me. So there will be no doubt."
I could not imagine what suspicion worried her, but I soon discovered there was no measuring her feeling of order breaking down. I did as I was told and took her picture, and this simple absorbing of her appearance seemed to soothe her, in the way a handful of opening peonies might have charmed another hostess. She made me finish the roll, though she did not bother with other poses or attitudes. There was no vanity in her submitting to the lens. Indeed, she regarded the camera with the inquisitive disdain of someone quite ill inspecting an alleged wonder drug, but used to many frauds.
I held the film in my hand and told her, encouragingly, "The first step in the comeback."
"I'm 40, Mr. Thomson. At that age in this city a woman is expected to do the right thing--like Captain Oates, walking out into the blizzard."
A little daunted, I tried to compliment her on the jewel-like appeal of her home.
"Oh, I don't live here," she said, exasperated with my misunderstanding. "I couldn't live here. You don't really get anything, do you? Those writers with the big opinions--they never get anything."
"Well--" I began.
"Writing all that stuff, and not knowing a damn thing!"
"To write is to seek," I supposed.
She would have none of this (though giants of Hollywood have gathered around the same triteness as if it were a Francis Bacon). She stood up, and her sandals snapped at the pool's surround. She lit a cigarette and picked tirelessly at blooms in the foliage behind her. After examining (searching?) each flower's head, she dropped it in the pool until her dog was surrounded.
"You people who write about the business, you're so innocent! Especially when you try to be insiders."
"I am not sure readers want this kingdom to be real. They like to believe the best and the worst."
She stared at me now, as if actually weighing what I had said. I could see the youth still in her, or maybe it was just a David Bailey 1/l00th of drop-dead affront, hands splayed to guard her breasts--you know the shot. "Perkins Cobb used you," was all she said.
"Perhaps, but amiably."
"Amiably?"
"We were friends." I hoped the humble claim might put off her belligerence. A part of me did not want Perk--or my faith--ruined. Yet some pitiless curiosity in me was also ready for the rumor of any evil.
"He was an operator," she said. "He did lots of things. He was always doing things. You think all he did was My Sweet Dread--that's a joke. He'd do anything for money, power, knowledge. Anything that got him inside. God, he knew the real stuff! Freddie Katz--did you hear that one?"
"I don't believe I know a Katz."
"That was Perko's real name. He was never from Utah. He was raised in Ventura. He kept Utah for that splashy death scene."
I had noted, in fact, how oddly Perk's farewell had anticipated the last automobile vault into space in Thelma ? Louise.
"A movie's the only fit place for that kind of death," she said, and she looked at me forlornly, searching for a sign of intelligence. Then she clicked her gaunt fingers and Laura came up out of the pool, water tumbling from her lean sides.
"We can't stay here."
"But we've just started," I protested.
"Do you have a car?" she demanded.
I told her yes, but how was she without transport or luggage if she was staying in this house? As she hurried me off the premises I wondered if she had not simply walked in moments before I arrived.
The dog soaked the upholstery in my car, and Graziella smoked all the way to her next residence--the only person who has ever smoked in that Corolla. The Clark Plaza Suites, between Beverly and Wilshire, is a sedately gloomy place in a placid, residential area. When we entered, Graziella had to announce her name, leaning across me toward the speaker, before the gateway to the underground garage would grind open.
"Gray Opper," she said, her mouth inches from my ear. When I kept a very still head, she added, murmuring, "My real name. I abandoned it when I was hot. Made people think of rabbits."
Her suite at Clark Plaza was chaos. There were clothes, books, papers and tapes, pizza boxes and corn chip bags on every possible surface, and over everything there was Laura's fine blonde hair. There were file cabinets, leaning piles of old, stale newspapers, clippings, every sign of someone struggling to swim in the world's seething information. It reminded me rather of my own apartment, so she and I may have grown closer there because of the disorder. We made a kind of remote love (this was only proximity and narrative availability) and, when I woke, I found a cassette wedged between my toes.
What did she tell me about my hero, Perkins Cobb? That he was a scoundrel, a traitor and a fraud, and that she adored him still and could not accept that he was gone.
"Off a butte in Utah?" she asked me. "In a white Cadillac? What was the body like--do you know that?"
"Battered," I seemed to remember, "and burned a good deal, but--"
"Cobb Salad Crisp?"
"--but they were confident it was him."
"'They' would be. Cobb knew 'them' inside out."
I have to say, the possibility appealed. Perk was too playful just to quit.
I visited Graziella several times in the next few months, and the tirade never faltered. She told me Perk had done many other movies besides My Sweet Dread, or parts of movies, or parts of projects. He had been a "doctor," she said, whose presence let others know they were ill. I cannot name all the pictures involved--there are legal difficulties. But she showed me a videocassette in which no less than Laurence Olivier was shown reciting a verse for children by Maurice Sendak. "I told you once/I told you twice/all seasons/of the year/are nice/for eating/chicken soup/with rice!" Graziella told me this came from a children's book with a verse for every month. Perk had filmed the whole book. She had seen some of the months over the years--Cary Grant had done May and Louise Brooks (sitting up in bed, coughing) September--and she believed that the other contributors had included John Cazale, Paulette Goddard and Truman Capote.
"Where is the whole film?" I longed to know. "It must be a delight."
"Don't know," she said, staring at me askance. "But don't you get it?"
"What's to get?"
"Why would a man do that?"
"As play?" I surmised. "Or--for a kid?"
"Exactly," she pounced. "And no one knows where it might be--or who its mother was."
"Not you?" I enquired, as tenderly as I was able.
"Bless you for asking," was all she answered.
I gathered from Graziella--and I do not know how much to believe--that Perk had been an agent of certain police forces, in L.A. and perhaps farther afield. She maintained that the police had early on seen the wisdom of keeping files on potent figures in the entertainment world, so there had been opportunities for insiders with dope on the past and other guilty secrets. Perk had been a home-movie-maker at many parties--Graziella alluded to the homes of Warren Oates, Norman and Dana Chase, Barry Diller, and the Dunlap sisters--and no one knew what had become of the footage.
"This is mere speculation," I said, for I had begun to sniff Peter Lawfordism in the air.
"And don't think there weren't people who wondered what he'd seen, or recorded."
"It could be fascinating material," I admitted--I myself had long been on the trail of Hollywood home movies of the '30s. And now, in the video age, with astonishing low-light capabilities...
"But dangerous."
It was her conviction that Perk had somehow gone too far, that he had betrayed trusts, and that what I had taken for his own resolute quietism was something far more sinister.
Graziella was always jittery. She seldom slept for more than 20 minutes at a time. She had a terror of being doubted--and to treat her fears she had only cocaine, occasional carnality and the dreadful mirrors of her suite. She sat for hours repairing age but spying fresh eruptions. Her concentration wavered, and there were stories she gave up on in midstream. For instance, I never found out what "the Robert Towne tapes" might be.
There was so little hard evidence supporting her Perkins Cobb conspiracy theory, apart from the Olivier/Sendak material, and the five other pictures on the roll of film I had finished on her, apparently views of some desert ghost town--real or a set, who could say? Otherwise, there was only the mess in which Graziella was always searching, and the rising whine of her innuendo and dread.
And so gradually I withdrew as 1991 came to an end. There were calls I did not return, or lingered over answering. Then one day this January I was told at Clark Plaza that she was gone. I wondered what had become of all her papers and possessions. And what about that faithful Laura?
There was no mention of the dog in the report of the accident. I only noticed the small, inside story days later, how at Alden and Palm in the early hours of January 7th there had been what appeared to be a hit-and-run accident in which a woman, Grace Opper, had been killed. In the picture that accompanied the article, I saw the pattern of Graziella's flowered skirt. I went to check out the body--too late, it was cremated. But there was a morgue shot. Graziella looked peaceful.
The papers said nothing about the accident victim having been Graziella Ortiz. It was as if the wondrous face of the '70s had been a ghost all along, and actual death the final proof. I enquired, but I have had no answers. I went to Alden and Palm late one night. It seemed to me that for a vehicle to have hit her the way it appeared in the Times photograph, it would have to have been going the wrong way, or ... And how was there a picture in the first place? The police denied taking it.
Sometimes around seven on these early spring evenings, as twilight creeps in, I do wonder about the traffic in this L.A. of ours. Is it a mass of private purposes seeking their own routes, or is there a pattern, a single force for which every turn and tremor is known in advance? I have been happy in this city over the years, loved its light, its dusk and the movies that play with both. But now I begin to wonder whether there is not a fatal design. And if I pass this on, for whatever it may be worth, I do ask myself whether I am known and watched and waited on because of things I have learned, and because of what strangers wonder. I look at the pictures of that ghost town--did Cobb hide out there? Or is he down the street in that gray Cutlass, waiting for me to pause and dream at the curb?
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David Thomson is the author of Silver Light, Warren Beatty, and Desert Eyes and Suspects.