The Hollywood Years: Cock, Cocaine and Caftans

I thought of them as the Cocaine Trilogy: Xanadu, Can’t Stop the Music, and My Tutor. Movies made around the magic year 1980, written, produced and starring cocaine, that is, addled movie insiders whose every idea was taken to be fucking brilliant. The ruins of such cocaine circle-jerks can be seen in the trailer above. What memories it doesn’t bring back!

I was living in Hollywood at the time, trying to break into screenwriting, turning out magazine features for Andy Warhol’s Interview, where I began what I still laughingly call my career. The 80′s in L.A. … how does one conjure quite that ambiance of a bland Republican bank plaza at noon, blasted with direct, shadowless light.

That mix of flat vistas, of nothing-special brunch franchises where West Hollywood porn stars could be seen at noon, shirtless on the patio, nursing groggy Bloody Marys, the impression that day or night you would find somebody in striped aerobics tights shopping the Ralph’s, the big fluffy blown-dry hair on men who looked like blond televangelists, and those perky young girls on Melrose whose main mission was to find a new place on their head to put a ponytail.

Xanadu does it best, I guess, evoking that… certain nothing.

Lost years. Lost in an L.A. smog. Until suddenly…

FADE IN: Today. An email, a link, a YouTube. And through the massive power of art — that is, the above trailer — my misspent, youth was mine to misspend all over again.

Watching the young Matt Lattanzi emote so blushingly I had a cocaine flashback, which, for you children, is much worse than an Acid flashback, where you just see yellow spots for a moment and have a floating feeling that is vaguely religious in a Tijuana painting-on-velvet sort of way. No, a cocaine flashback pulls you into a haggard nightmare of jitterinesss, the sensation that you are about to start talking and won’tbeabletostop.

So there I was flashing back on the face of Matt Lattanzi when I said, wait a minute! Wait a flying minute! I’m sure I met this twink at a Hollywood party in the woods. A well-connected Interview editor had rented a house right under the Hollywood Sign and the party was a barbecue on the wild, sloping grounds beneath the letter “W.” Allan Carr was holding court from a lawn chair, in a spreading caftan, which resembled a tent dress and was the rage that year with the Ah Men-Paul Lynde brigade.

Now Allan Carr, as any properly brought up gaybot can tell you, was the producer of Grease, Where the Boys Are: 1984 and the most fabulous Oscar show ever, the 61st Annual Academy Awards, the one where Rob Lowe danced with Snow White, that brought on a lawsuit from the Disney people and was universally panned as the worst Oscar telecast in history (but these philistines say the same thing about Mommie Dearest, which we all know is a shrieking masterpiece.)

Anyway Allan Carr had brought this little cutie to the party, and the operative word for the boy was little. He was a doll boy with a natural blush that stood out on his cheeks like a red rash, and a round apple ass. The boy, soon to be known to the world for a second as Matt Lattanzi, wandered about in his petite, hollowed-cheeked way, making the rest of us queens feel like linebackers, so gem-like was he.

My Tutor revealed his voice to the world and the world was not kind. He eventually married Olivia Newton John (Alan Carr = Grease) and they lived happily ever after for awhile, a very straight couple, after the Hollywood fashion. They had a child, also after the Hollywood fashion, which was mercifully a daughter.

The next I heard Olivia had married somebody else and that somebody was lost in the wilds of Australia under very suspicious circumstances. Everybody suspected foul play but then Olivia started wearing pink ribbons and saying she had breast cancer and everybody forgot about the missing nobody second husband.

Where are they now? These apple-cheeked boys, these producers in caftans, these well-connected Interview editors? Gone to flowers, every one. Except for Matt, who managed not to catch AIDS (and with that ass yet!) and still walks the streets of Canberra, a zombie version of the boy treasure he once was.