The Chrysanthemum Palace

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BUT I DIDN’T PROPERLY INTRODUCE myself.

My name is Bertram Valentine Krohn (Valentine being the hero of Stranger in a Strange Land, and Henry Miller’s middle name too. Dad baptized me thus, and really showed his hand). I’m thirty-eight years old but most everyone calls me Bertie. The valentine-giving father is Perry Needham Krohn, creator-producer in perpetua of TV’s longest-running syndicated space opera, Starwatch: The Navigators. You may have heard of him — he continues, after many years, to be a staple of Variety, the Times, the Beverly Hills Courier and 213—not so much for his deal-making activities but in conjunction with whatever organization happens to be paying tribute (I should say he’s paying them), which seems to occur on a bimonthly basis. You see, Dad likes lending his name to good causes, attracting old/new money to new/old diseases, relishing the hubbub of silent auctions and black-tie balls — says it keeps him young. Mom hates all that, but I think vanity prevents her from attending the galas. More about her later.

I was raised, as you might have guessed, in a world of great privilege. In fact, sad as it may sound, I’ve always considered “Bertie Krohn: The Early Years” to be among the happiest of my life. And while this document tilts more toward reportage than memoir, the thought occurred it might be ideal to recount a few personal anecdotes from that era of my youth. As earlier alluded, it will help warm the muscles (I already feel a writer’s cramp coming on), and besides, it’s my opinion — and that of at least two critics, one biographer and a New Yorker short-story contributor, all friends of Dad’s who’ve been obliquely interrogated by yours truly — that the closer one is to the storyteller, the likelier one is to embrace what is told.

Like most of us, I failed to escape the minor joys, major heartbreaks, and brushes with mortality that apply to any youth’s rightful passage; so let me begin with Death and work my way back to Ecstasy. Remember that amazing show, Tales from the Crypt? It was actually a comic book before that. (Dad has a leather-bound set.) Well, allow me to flip through a few of my own illustrated panels — what Clea used to call the “not-so-funnies.” They’re a bit macabre but pertinent to my own tale, I assure.

I’m an only child. No one in the immediate family perished during my impressionable years (as opposed to the later, “depressionable years”—Clea, again). That said, there was an artistic cousin who died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma who lived somewhere in the Midwest and would be buried too in that same region of my mind. A few miles from our house in Benedict Canyon, the baby sister of a friend was struck by a car and killed, but, owing to my never having seen much of her before the event, the wraith became more ghoulish abstraction than cautionary tale. Upon entering high school, a bookish junior became trapped in a second-floor house fire on South Roxbury Drive and got the fingers of her hand burnt off; she returned in the second semester of the next year and was treated by the student body as if she’d joined an Indian caste in the interim: a mixture of Brahman and Untouchable, a kind of Mother Teresa horror-show saint. Then there was Aaron, whose folks owned the town pharmacy. He only lasted till the sixth grade, dying of a cerebral hemorrhage one summer near Indian Wells.

But the highest reading on the Richter Mortality Scale by far was the death of Leif Farragon, the handsomest boy I’d ever known and the funniest too. He was tall, tousled and fatherless, with a dimpled chin and a gorgeous mom who taught second grade at Horace Mann. I can still summon the smell of his skin through the velour turtlenecks then in vogue, evoking the gregarious, gemütlich, goyish life force that was irresistibly, quintessentially Leif. Every kid I knew had money except for him. Instead of going to El Rodeo or Hawthorne, he attended the very school where his mother worked, the poorest, fringiest, farthest flung of the four Beverly Hills publics, yet by virtue of bawdy sarcasm, athletic grace, and generosity of spirit, the charismatic boy had literally crossed over (Wilshire Boulevard) to join the upper echelon of the district’s social strata.

I remember being with him at a party on North Rodeo Drive. My girlfriend at the time — we were all of us nearing thirteen — was the aforementioned Clea Fremantle, daughter of legendary film actress Roosevelt Chandler née Delia LeMay Chaiken. I doubt that things have much changed but back then, rich kids began having serious parties at a fairly tender age, facilitated not only by the handy venue of mansions’ shadowy acreage and multiple trysting zones but the inept, well-meaning agenda of absentee parents zealously contriving to watch over scions through the indulgent, lackadaisical eyes of longtime live-in help. We young royals did plenty of frenching and groping and cupping of half-breasts; I can still remember Clea’s smells, less familiar than Leif’s and sometimes immobilizing in mysterious ways — like a fearful hunter, time and again I froze in my tracks while hand, heart, and gland gamely soldiered on, shaky finger on hairy triggers. We commandeered various guest rooms for musky, R-rated kisses under the benign gaze of Mom, in movie poster form. While suffocating ourselves with cavorting tongues that slo-mo fenced like thick forest slugs, I occasionally opened a wandering eye to take in the epic, voluptuous Roos Chandler, she of the requisite small-town transformation to deathless American icon, she of the self-anointed film noir nom de ciné, she of the occasional madcap nude night swim during bashful daughter’s fledgling soirée sleepovers, she of the three husbands before the age of thirty, she of the consecutive Academy Awards — Best Supporting, Best Actress, Best Actress.

Here’s what happened when lanky Leif, eight months older than Clea and I, and more than a little stoned, stumbled into that borrowed love nest one warm Santa Ana — scoured night. He brought a bottle of scotch and that high-pitched, infectious laugh that would have sounded silly coming from the throat of anyone else. Startled by the intrusive bright light of the hall, Clea and I, fashionably mussed, awkwardly disengaged. Closing the door behind him, Leif passed us the amber bottle. I swigged first — it took all the macho I could muster not to vomit — then handed it off to Clea, whose face wore a rosy, newborn look on account of our aborted petting session. (At the time, I wondered why she was so introverted though now the Family Ties syndrome seems obvious: knowing she couldn’t outwild her mother, she instinctively went the other way. That was probably what attracted me — had she been crazy like Roos, it would have been too much to handle.) Before I knew it, Leif was kissing her and somehow that was all right, though it didn’t exactly feel all right… more like some casual rehearsal for future heartbreak and generic grief. Yet because I loved Leif in a way as much as I did Clea, I was forced to let it go. I knew she must have loved him too, perhaps even more for the sheer boldness I was incapable of. I’ll admit at the time the subtleties were lost upon me; my immediate concerns were more primitive. I hoped and prayed the night wouldn’t end with the two of them going “steadily”—these tide turnings weren’t all that uncommon and in such cases, the prescient student body already knew of the cuckold’s infamy when he arrived at school the next morning, head hung low. Nothing to do but wear one’s scarlet letter jacket and get on with it.

At that age, friends come and go in superheated fashion. After the kiss, for reasons both simple and complex, Leif and I managed not to lay eyes on each other for almost a few months. In the end, we were friendly, though never like before. One could say we fell out over betrayal as much as embarrassment (it was almost as if Leif and I were the ones who’d kissed) but I think the estrangement was mostly the growing pains rhythm of how things go — or went. Anyway, Leif had lots of tribes, a whole clique on the other side of Wilshire who I’d never met and I was absolutely certain were as possessive of him as the richies. Looking back, it’s probably better that fate conspired to separate us before he died a year later in an accident on PCH. (Losing a friend on that highway was a Westside rite of passage.) I can’t remember who told me or where I was when I heard, and never learned the exact how of it. I avoided such knowledge — he may or may not have been in a VW van, he may or may not have been on a motorcycle, he may or may not have been on the back of a chopper or hitching or even dashing across the highway with a surfboard to the beach.

At that age, fatal details are never important.

A short time after he died, another loss occurred that didn’t have the same impact but haunted me into adulthood nonetheless.

The death of Roos Chandler was announced in the media as “an adverse reaction to prescription drugs.” Loyal to Clea and in my own naïveté, I was a wholehearted believer. Soon, whispers at school became cruel chatter, exposing the official version as one of those lies to be forever scribbled on and defaced, tagged, retagged and erased, sandblasted, whitewashed then painted over in a thousand hues of confederacy and martyrdom, before the cycle of slanderous graffiti reshuffled and relooped its mordant canticle. Being public property, Clea’s mother’s exorbitantly tumultuous life was long since archived in preparation for the entombment of popular myth — prefab obits had been updated, polished, and honed in clinical anticipation; once the offering of that ruined, voluptuous body’s bleached bones were borne aloft by the collective unconscious, their passage lit by the eternal flame of tabloid tiki torches, her remains made their more worldly exit upon the ample, profiteering shoulders of agents, false friends, gossipmongers, and trademark attorneys who passed for pallbearers.

This is how I wound up being haunted: Soon after the announcement of Roos Chandler’s death, I performed a vanishing act of my own, and it was twenty-five years before I spoke to my own flickering old flame. The news mortified me to my core and I’d run for my very life — as if death had leaped the fence like a brush fire, threatening to transform me into the gnarled, nubby-fingered girl who’d been caught in the Roxbury conflagration and returned to the flock a blackened sheep in head scarves. It wasn’t long before I assiduously avoided my poor, dear, bedraggled Clea, so as not to catch what she had. At least she had the elegance not to press me on the matter, though maybe native fragilities bade her shrink from confrontation. (I wouldn’t have been easy to find.)

As I one day would learn, her own haunts took precedence over mine.

It’s funny what draws us to people; funny we don’t often see the design of it. Sons dramatically rebel against fathers in order to expunge debts owed to the one who sheltered though did not nurture — it’s hard to forge an identity while paying the metaphorical rent, even harder when that patriarch is wealthy and power-driven. But who’s to say? I divorced Dad but it still wasn’t enough. I knew his weaknesses, and delighted in giving the knife a further turn.

Perry Krohn wrote short stories in college, immodestly considering himself a cross between Camus and Philip K. Dick (this, according to Mother, whose name, I should already have told you, is Gita), one of which, “Starry Night,” became the basis for a TV pilot that evolved into the sacred cash cow Starwatch: The Navigators. He grew wealthy beyond imagining yet in his darkest hours considered himself a failure and a hack. In moments of self-doubt, the money helped to assuage — as did the extramarital affairs, the weekly bridge game at the Friar’s (stag), the Saturday afternoon pickup games with The Simpsons gang on his private basketball court, the clarinet playing in a klezmer band — a fixture on Thursday nights à la Woody Allen at Chickpea, the restaurant he owned in West Hollywood — as did the Krohn Family Foundation, established to put inner-city kids through med school in exchange for their agreement upon graduation to spread the gospel of AIDS prevention in Third World countries, as did the collection of watercolors by D. H. Lawrence and William Blake, the fifty or so dioramas of Joseph Cornell, the eight Renoirs, the four Degas and five Courbets, the Schnabels, Hirsts, Barneys, Rodins, Ruschas, and eighty-ton Serra in the front — yes, front — yard… as did the fifteen nonconsecutive pages of van Gogh’s diary extracts, as did the so on and the so forth, each acquisition or cultural conquest acting as bulwark against the flood of Father’s shamefully mediocre talents, which is how he perceived them in his privately aggrieved heart: an actual menace to Art. Yet, as if to quixotically inoculate himself against a disease he was already dying of, our stubborn, stalwart Dr. Jekyll continued to collect sculptures, paintings, people, and nonprofits like they were the families of Jews to be saved from Mr. Hyde’s schlockmeister Holocaust hands, hiding them (from himself) behind secret bookcases from a crassly commercial, ratings-driven, compromised world, like blue shadows in a bejeweled underground subway, far away from the Gestapo eyes of revenue-streaming Starwatch storm troopers. To this day, my father remains a curious mixture of lowbrow and aesthete.

Knowing these things were a hedge he’d made against the one magnificently wrong, winning bet of his life—Starwatch: The Navigators—and knowing too I could never, by conscience or proclivity, safely tread water anywhere near the great, churning engines of that lucrative enterprise, I resolved to torment the man by becoming a sunken treasure myself, or at least aspiring to embody one of those elusive objets he always won at auction yet could never truly possess. After a year at Oxford, I transferred to Berkeley and formed a theater troupe. We did Artaud in the nude and put up a controversial all-white production of A Raisin in the Sun. In my third term, I wrote a one-act, raffishly presenting it as a bona fide, newfound Beckett; after ten performances, French lawyers bade us cease and desist. Perry flew up in his Bombardier on opening night, sitting in back of the cold warehouse space with smiling, covetous eyes. I still held parentage against him, hypocritically spurning his attempts to give me cash while accepting it from Gita on the sly.

I grew tired of the revolutionary life and decided to make my name as an actor in the movies. I quit the university and resettled in Venice. While fervently contemplating writing, directing, and starring in a film to be funded by my platinum Amex, I freelanced for a matchmaker (cupidsarrow.com) during the boom then apprenticed at a CGI house during the bust. I got a part on The Days of Our Lives, smugly resisting the call of little theater. I went to the right parties and clubs, becoming friendly with young, wild-assed agents and unshaven, supersmart promoters, nascent Brent Bolthouses. Somehow I met John Cusack and the director Miguel Arteta and took small roles in a couple of their films. I drank too much and ate too many pills, matriculating through the Twelve Steps — I drew the line at cold turkeying Wellbutrin, convinced it was helping me kick cigarettes — with the usual results: crushing depression and mood swings, white-knuckled sobriety, fruitless industry networking at Double A meetings with attendant amorous liaisons dangereuses. I landed a few more gigs before abandoning cinema for TV, even though I considered it Dad’s turf, my crossover smacking of capitulation and loserdom.

Perry and I grew closer, but it was more his cancer scare than any mellowing of ambition on my part that affected our rapprochement. (I remembered the lesson of Roos Chandler and just didn’t have it in me to run.) I saw up close and personal how excreting into a bag for a few months had a way of breaking a man and it broke me a little too. To my surprise, I actually began to consider working on Dad’s show — as writer, actor, whatever. My therapist and even my friends saw the impulse as a sign of newfound health and maturity. I fought halfheartedly against my own idea until one morning I looked in the mirror and said, Get over yourself. It was the new year after September 11 and the world no longer felt like a sure thing; the time was nigh, it seemed, to exercise squatter’s rights on a few, potentially very green Starwatch acres. Maybe in a subliminal way I was beginning to nest — terrible term! — anyhow, that’s what the shrink said. Get a job, meet a girl, buy a house (and a Chinese kid if the reproductive organs weren’t up to speed). Get a life, like everyone else.

Nest or no nest, in the back of my head, or maybe the front, were the first rumblings of the dream to create a classy show for cable. I didn’t need more therapy to reveal an essential truth: I was too old to be kicking against pricks, be they paternal or self-generated. Still, I thought of myself as a tough customer, an independent thinker, a free spirit. Gita indulged me in my prideful little protests — I won’t be another asshole driving his BMW on and off the lot, I’d say, not me. During cozy tête-à-têtes, Mother would bolster, “Just do what you want, Bertie. Whatever decision you come to will be the right one.” She was so convincing I believed her every time. She was my “stick man,” or whatever they call the guy in the boxer’s corner who stops the bleeding between rounds, only in this case, the opponent was Me. Mom’s art was in making me think I had a choice: that pauper or prince would be OK — with her, and whichever God that ruled. The truth was that she loved me so much, none of it mattered so long as I was safe, moderately comfortable and close by. (The thing she hated most was the idea of my moving away again.) Gita knew what was best, for both of us, and that I needed to be protected against my own bullheadedness. She knew I needed the security and self-worth a regular job would provide, something, say, in the family business. I fought it all the way, articulate and convincing in my arguments — at the onset of middle age, one still has the vigor to put an aggressive spin on defeat — while sweet Judas goat Mom led me to luxurious slaughter. I will never hold it against her.

So I huddled with the old man to lay it all out, and he couldn’t have been happier. Convened with the show runners and they couldn’t have been happier. Cruised with the casting folks and they couldn’t have been happier… and Gita, who not so secretly had savored the years of heartburn I’d provided her husband, was, in the end, undisguisedly thrilled. I was welcomed to the fold—street-legal—now eligible for the backstage pass and all that went with it. Life was good. Life was shit. I was even allowed input as to what role I’d play on that ridiculous-looking floating Emerald City, the USS Demeter. I requested a non-prosthetic look (the makeup people couldn’t have been happier) and some genius staffer came up with the idea of my playing a randy, all-American pilot on the good starship lollipop, a throwback goof on Top Gun. In just six weeks’ time, I was hanging on the bridge with the legendary captain (who’d renegotiated his fee in a recent PR dustup) and his band of merry men. I fell into episodic rhythm like I was born to it, which I guess I was. I wiled away off-camera time writing treatments in my trailer with the sensual torpor of a geisha having her feet soaked — writing and producing an epic, auteur/non-dumbshit series was where it was at. I would use my time creatively, and get paid for it too. Oh, I was clever! I’d write my ass off, until I could get my HBO shot. In training for the big leagues.

Sorry for the digression.

I was talking about how often we’re blind to the design of what draws us to others. It’s a constant shock how early one’s patterns are set, and one’s proclivities too. In hindsight, it’s easy to see the pull Clea exerted because, like me, she labored under the Promethean shadow of a parent whom she could never hope to outshine. (When we were kids, Starwatch was in the first few seasons of its astonishingly popular launch — so that in my proscribed world, Roos and Perry were on equal footing.) Our alliance was custom-made; like deaf children, or hearing children of the deaf, we were fluent in a shorthand that required no words. Classmates were mere embryos compared to our fully formed identities as The Children Of, and while we instinctively knew such status put us at a terrifying disadvantage in the long term, at that early age our social position was a boon, for along with blessed birthright came the aura and honors conferred upon any regal offspring. As said, we seemed darkly, precociously in possession of the secret knowledge that, like hemophiliacs, we would eventually pay an awful price, yet felt ourselves to be in a celestial grace period, a state of constant holiday. All children are attention junkies and we were titillated to be the recipients of the seigneurial perks incidental to our position: the crude currying of favor among peers, the indirect adulation of the latters’ parents, even the covert acknowledgment by schoolteachers of our prominent placement in the local, generally overprominent constellatory array. We were the brightest stars that hung by the honeymoon of those halcyon years.

In such a lunar light, the chasm that I dug between myself and Clea upon her mother’s death can now be seen as an all-the-more-ruthless act: I had committed the paramount sin of abandoning my own kind. As blue bloods, slightly inbred, we could only flourish in the absence of adversity — how could it have been otherwise? We had always enjoyed divine protection, and there was nothing in the rule book about those (parental) gods succumbing to Death.

I remembered, because at the time, I’d frantically — and futilely — scanned the index.

I didn’t see her until my thirty-seventh year, when we ran into each other at an AA meeting in a Brentwood church. (Clea used to say they should just drop the A and call it Alcoholics—“There is no real anonymity.”) She had three months of sobriety and didn’t look well.

Ten years ago, around the time I returned from the Bay Area and moved to Venice, Clea began making a name for herself as an actress. Her career hadn’t taken off but she’d done respectable work in small, respectable films, even winning an award at a prestigious festival in Berlin. For a while there were pictures of her in magazines — the lighting always seemed to emphasize the luminous bone structure and hooded eyes inherited from her mom — hobnobbing with pals, other groovy sons and daughters of icons, like Natasha Gregson Wagner or Charlie Sheen. I read all the interviews and saw all the movies (they screened mostly at the Sunset 5), following Clea’s career with a kindly stalker’s eye. She was good, sometimes very good. In a few films, she wasn’t fully dressed. All right, I’ll admit there was something slightly morbid about my attentions; maybe that’s not the right word. I flirted with the idea of contacting her but never did. I think — no, I’m certain — I was putting off a reunion until I had a degree of success to call my own. I wanted some measure of achievement before we broke bread or wine or heroin or whatever it was she wanted to break. I was actually quite amazed this almost pathologically shy girl not only chose to become an actress but had made real headway. I was also reminded — as if by the whisper of our old shorthand — that kids like us were genetically programmed to fly straight into the flames of their flamboyant heritage. Call it one of our fatal, masochistic charms.

Her career blipped along a few years before dropping off the showbiz radar. There were bitchy murmurs of drug intake — the town had a great sense of rumor — and the usual gossipy, unimaginative “like mother, like daughter” psychologizing overheard at clubs, screenings, and premiere parties. I can remember Clea’s unfocused face staring from the cover of a newsstand tabloid, feeling all noble about declining to make purchase (I leafed through instead). A few more mentions in the press — random, unjazzy catalogues of a tailspin, because by then she didn’t even rate the front page — before relegation to obscurity. I went through a big Howard Stern phase and for a long time part of me listened with perverse dread for the inevitable sado-dissection riff. Thankfully, it never came.

When I saw her at the church on San Vicente, Clea’s smile, lovely and bright, erased all the years — suddenly, we were twelve again. We sat beside one another and stood for the closing prayer, holding hands. After the meeting, overcome, I walked her to the courtyard and breathlessly made amends, confessing my shame and embarrassment over how I’d handled Roosevelt Chandler’s death (as if that childish faux pas had been the great traumatizing event of Clea’s life, surpassing even the loss of her mother). But she had no recollection of my cowardice or how I’d fled, even going so far as to say I had always been her port in the storm. “The best boyfriend I ever had — the best” was how she put it, with the sweetest, slinkiest wink. Upon absolution, I experienced the proverbial weight literally lift from my shoulders. With boundless affection and enormous gratitude, I tearfully asked her to dinner. Her eyes crinkled up and she hugged me, saying how sweet I was. Then, saucily: “No more confessions.”

We went for sushi across from Dutton’s. She’d been favoring her right arm — it relaxed in a silken makeshift sling — and midway through the meal I inquired what happened. She said that the last time she “used,” she’d nodded out and fallen asleep on it, sustaining nerve damage. I’d heard of that sort of thing happening to addicts but it was a keen shock it had befallen my precious Clea. She said a doctor weaned her off the heroin with pills and she was doing “tons” of acupuncture and physical therapy. Yoga was also a help and she’d recovered “about 70 percent range of motion.” When I asked where she was living, Clea said excitedly, “An amazing motel in Beverly Hills.” I told her I knew the place, over on Reeves (“Bertie,” she interjected, “I so want to write a reality show about the people who live there!”) — I remembered it from rare incursions to Leif Farragon’s south-of-Wilshire turf on my silver, high-handled ten-speed. As she spoke, I cruelly surveyed the parched plains of skin, flaky and blemished, and plumbed Clea’s half-dead eyes. Eyes that jauntily seduced, working overtime to camouflage the damage done through the years gone by.