The Location Scout

INTRO WITH WHAT HE’S SEEING OUT THE WINDOWS

Jerry Guole had always been a scout. In the fifth grade, wearing a badge that proclaimed it literally in embroidered writing above an embroidered tent and an embroidered firepit, he had led his fellow sufferers through the dry scrubbrush that held the San Bernadino county foothills from their inevitable slip into the ocean, and ended the hike at the Raffles Resort, its pool gleaming like a ring-pop dug up from the bottom of a box of Wheetabix. Slim mothers in jet-black one-pieces hovered poolside—dozing on chaises, leaning over tinkling drinks. The ratpack changed quickly from their uniforms into pajama tops, their bathing suit bottoms, and hid the uniforms, cans of cooking supplies, the fold-up stove—in the cavernous space between two rocks, a hiding space found by Guole when he had retreated to take a piss. The boys played the part of tourists’ children, strolling confidently through the lobby, spaced in groups of two and three. Martins faked a German accent loudly, Toby Briar carried the cell-phone his mother had made him pack in case of grave emergency, and the blonde boy Guole remembered admiring but whose name he could no longer recall, had patted him on the back as they walked past the concierge and said, “I love you, my brother” in the stilted English of the Spanish Conquistadors they had seen in the videotape played in history class. After long, leisurely swims—side-stroke, back-stroke, drowning matches and cannonball contests—the boys took naps on the chaises lined up along the platform—stealing sidelong glances at the women sleeping beside them under the brims of floppy sunhats.
In High School, Guole was the kid whose popularity, to the teachers, was non-sensical—seemingly based completely on his unimpeachable confidence. A gawky half-Chinese, half-Norwegian (son of a Military Pastor serving in Hong Kong), Guole was adept at mathematics (though he seemed not to try) and could memorize historical facts with forthright ease. In the cafeteria, Mrs. Logan observed him flirting confidently with Beverly Hills offspring, as though just another one of them—though after school Guole took a bus way out to LaBrea, to an apartment whose smoke-filled curtains kept his nervous mother in the dark all day. She worked at home making gift baskets—compiling soaps, muffins, jams and flowers—and cinching the tops with clear cellophane that came in rolls she’d unfurl over the kitchen floor, a layer of clarity over a muddle of 60s avocado, repaired with slabs of tessellating 70s stars. The father, a studious, religious man who in his youth had pioneered exploratory outings on in Hong Kong’s nearby islands, was dead.
Guole stayed away from home. He had an eye for glamour and his house had none of it. Later he would understand that he had simply found something he was good at, and stuck to it. This was the moment in the VH1 documentary about his life when his career took over his personal life. It was in High School that at scouting, he became unimpeachable.
Take what Guole still thought of as the shining moment in what would become a long career. A flirty girl, crammed beside him in the backseat of a friend’s Datsun, upon receiving a call on her enormous cell from an arrested friend who reported that the last party had just been broken up. Beneath a wave of blonde bang, Guole could see the girl’s oversized earring sparkle. She had said first, “I’m with Guole,” then over the other end of the phone line her friend had said something inaudible, then she had giggled and said—and it was this he would always remember—“It’s like he can smell cops. He can hear a party from miles away.”
Guole could not smell cops. He could not hear parties. He could see scenes. The slobbering boys on the balcony, hussling eachother about the keg—and forty feet away, the suddenly illuminated bedroom light of the nextdoor Beverly Hills mansion. He could imagine the husband, pacing in a bathrobe, placing the call. ENTER: Cops. At school, a whisper in Science Lab from the Lancaster girl—whose father, she had bragged to him at lunch, would be shooting a pilot in Venezuela over the weekend—to Justin Terraza, whose newly formed punk band was, according to LA Weekly, pretty good, was the perfect set-up for a late-night affair, and so that was where they were going in the Datsun, to the Lancasters, who would open the door at 1.30 and let the show start at 2.00, after Terrazza’s gig had finished up at the Bowl and he had enough time to get out of the Valley and a few drinks in him. START: Scene: Blowout party. Teens swivel, gyrate, hum. The band onstage is crashing xxxxxxx.
This job required these sort of earsx xxxxxxx the eyes for this job, the intuition as to what family on a block would let up a yard for a Claritin ad (look at the cars for a vanity plate) but he had also developed a new set of skills. Driving along the meandering routes that skirted the cliffs in the Pacific Palisades, Guole’s head was in two places at once. He still made visual tallies of the scenery on the ground, but now, given twenty years in the business, understood the city’s mapping. He could simultaneously see it all from above—the small black dot of the Lincoln Towncar as it snailed along the cliffs, following the roads as they wheedled around the lots of variegated mansions. There was the set where in 88, they had shot the xxxx scene in the David Lynch that had gotten Holly arrested. There was where the xxxx twins had xxxxxx. That was the xxxx and that was the xxxxxxx. The twenty years of footage to come from a single block, edited together, made in itself a kind of narrative that made a story that could only be understood coherently when the premise was, Here are all the dreams that America has of what kind of a thing could happen here. It was a topography of fantasy, built in layers through the years, cellophane replacing silt.

*****


The Oswego Mansion, at 83 De Pauw, was at the end of a very long block of history. The Pacific Palisades had long been the trough for the set-aside families of Hollywood’s creative minds—the type of men who needed space to think, as if the air up here—finally free of the smog from car grilles down by the beach—would be a help to those who sought to fill it with shrubs of smoke grown from the mouth-wet tips of weedy cigars. First had come the newly moneyed directors of the teens, orchestrating their homes with fantasmagorical precision. Butting from a scrubby cliff, a Yorkshire Tudor complete with brickwork that tessellated in the XXXXPATTERNOFGOLDSWEATERSxxxxx, had been dreamed up out of a mind that had never been further East than a car trip to Nevada; nearby, the quiet Mediterranean villa looking out over the sea sported wall torches of melded beach shells, a detail overseen by the actress wife of a Silent film director who had come closest to Greece in her role as Kalypso in the version of Homer’s epic, a remake which as sex-filled and violent as the original, with none of its other charms.
In the thirties, the Directors had moved Southward, choosing the overlarge manses of Beverly Hills closer to the studios, on the lots of newly knocked down farms. These were grander—they had grown wings, sprouted guest-houses, tennis courts, gardener’s villas and were close enough to the golf course so the children could bicycle there, before getting their licenses at thirteen and taking the parents’ Rolls to trundle to the beach for a day baking by the Santa Monica pier. Pacific Palisades were too far from the lawns, the surf, the parties and the strip of Montana where the restaraunts were at which you should be seen dining. Claro’s with its candles, Montego’s with the lace in the windows and the pretty hostess who had slept with Gable on the night that reached her pinaccle of fame.
The Pacific Palisades became that retreat of those who sought the “air” to clear their heads, but no longer the directors, for whom “air” had been a euphemism for grandeur. In the thirties, the houses were occupied by the writers. They sought here, in homes of overambition, overgrown by the climate’s atypical ivy—a mutty mix of bougeanvilla and forsythia nettles—if not placid stillness and total removal, the idea of that removal. They were aware that they occupied homes since abandoned; the best of them sought here an image of the shunned lover. They would take these homes and love them. Their wives—brought along from less glamorous apartments where they had felt “cooped up” felt this romance in a different way. These were the homes of the former greats, and now they were theirs to fix up and untangle. The long halls of guestrooms for the visiting dignitaries would now be occupied by children, who must be fed and bathed and kept out of their father’s study. The stillness sought, the placid silence, was now pierced by hoots and ballyhoos—children out in the pool, the domestic cries of “what’s thats?” shouted to wives trilling at the ends of long, corded telephones that they had brought out to the garden.
In the sixties, the money for these men was gone. Run like the hills still crumbling down to the sand. Some directors moved back here—artistic visionaries who pretended to shun the studios that fed them, seeking removal from systems—but the bulk of buyouts came from the pockets of actors, actresses, handsome men and women who cooed on tours given by chirping Real Estate agents in suits with padded shoulders, who after their clients had signed the contracts, thought to ask if they couldn’t also sign an autographed photograph. At home they threw long, fishlike dresses over the backs of settees. They fought in the foyer, ignored the missing top of the nule post after they had hurled it, broke the terracotta angels on the stoop with the drunken drive up the xxxxxxx with Barley in the frontseat after they had come from xxxxxx. The eaves filled with smoke—cigarette smoke, bitterer and brighter, coming from a sadder place.
It was here where Dietrich, Davis, Baccall and Russell had their most damning scenes—acting that was utterly natural, that came from no place. xxxxxxxxfights out by the poooooolllxxxxxxxxxxxx
Idea that to not act in the occupying place→ what scenes elapse!


A few blocks later and they had found DePauw street, spiking to the right, curving alongside the redrock hills that fed down into 200 yards of scrubbrush before a strip of coastline and the sea. Here, the mansions thinned out and grew wings, got room to grow like goldfish turned, by the size of their tanks, to koi.




Etched in 1907 to follow the meandering cliff, DePauw’s oldest homes stood on the side of the road furthest from but facing out toward the water, the former homes if not of Clarke Gable and Katherine Hepburn, then of their co-stars and, perhaps, directors. On the left-hand side of the road, as the car headed north, stood the wreckage of modern design, attempting not to falsify a more beautiful past, but to remain sleek and pale forever. Time, however, had taken a chunkier bite out of these more exposed homes, and cracks, black with mold, marred their skins. Windows, facing ocean winds, had in some cases been boarded with plywood. One home—a low, one-story ranch circa 1976, fitted-out for Bill and Joan Brady, had been sucked out, through one wall, to sea—standing now at the cliff-edge like a toy dollhouse—its interior bared, bars of golden light falling now across the tufty beige sand of its wall-to-wall carpets. The central staircase, gnawed by risen surf, was a white thing bruised like a man who had endured a scuffle. Bill Dean’s boy, the mop-headed smoker, had written, in the margin of his school copy of Call of the Wild, across from the sentence, “Nature does not abate the lives of men,” the note “Man v. Nature” (preparing as he well should have for the teacher’s tests) and aside to that written, “DePauw street is half gone.” The street wasn’t half-gone but it would be, and at the end of the curving tentacle of houses who could claim ocean-view, 1804 DePauw would be next, its fall inevitable.

*****

Guole watched the block unreel. First came the Dreyer mansion