AUDASE

Maps to the Stars: my film about the dark side of Hollywood

Bruce Wagner London Guardian

 

After dropping out of Beverly Hills High, screenwriter Bruce Wagner became a chauffeur to the stars, chasing ambulances with Olivia de Havilland and delivering corpses to hospital. Here he revisits the dark corners of the city that inspired his new film

　

Swimming pools are a recurring theme … Sunset Boulevard, 1950. William Holden (being dragged from pool). Photograph: PR

I grew up in Beverly Hills, a house away from Broderick Crawford, the gruff, leonine star of All the King’s Men and Highway Patrol. Whenever I dropped by to visit his stepdaughter, a schoolmate, he answered the door in a tattered terry-cloth robe, drunk. I remember when the girl’s mom – Crawford’s estranged wife, the starlet Joan Tabor – "accidentally" overdosed and died in her apartment off Doheny Drive. I was so embarrassed and mystified that I never spoke to my friend again.

My father was marginally in the business. Before his nervous breakdown, he’d send me to pick up Variety at a 24-hour coffee shop inside the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Groucho Marx was always kibitzing outside. I was in psychoanalysis at 14 – it was the fad. Walking to appointments, I’d see Charles Bronson cross the street like a panther, and an implacable Alfred Hitchcock, poodle propped on distended belly, in a chauffeured Rolls.

The fault in our stars … Julianne Moore in Maps to the Stars. Photograph: Allstar Picture Library

The kids who worked in showbiz would come late to middleschool – just after lunch – straight from the set, still in makeup and wardrobe. Dean Paul Martin Jr revved his Ferrari past the playground on his way to Rexford, a private bastion of learning for the incorrigible offspring of the famous. My bar mitzvah was thrown at the Friar’s Club. Tina Louise ("Ginger" on Gilligan’s Island) was one of my parents’ guests. I graduated to Beverly Hills High. Beverly’s swimming pool, beneath a retractable basketball court, made its screen debut in It’s a Wonderful Life. Special lunchtime assemblies featured the Doors and Linda Ronstadt.

After dropping out of Beverly, I worked in bookstores where I stole hundreds of volumes, then drove an ambulance, and then a limousine at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The last two vocations were quite similar because one encountered people in extremis – famous or posing-as-famous or dying or mentally ill, and sometimes all of the above – like the beautiful catatonic actress we drove up the coast to the legendary psych hospital called Camarillo. She’d been wearing her clothes for so long that they had to cut her sneakers off with scissors.

Star sign … tours round the homes of Hollywood movie stars in the 50s. Photograph: Kurt Hutton/Getty Images

Once, we transferred a model from a west Hollywood ER to County General. Apparently she’d shot herself in the head – so said her suicide note – but no gun was found at the scene, which obviously unsettled the police. On reaching the ward, a pistol clattered to the ground as we lifted her from the gurney. (The firemen had used her own bed sheet when they first moved her and everyone did the same thereafter because it was expedient – so the weapon lay dormant between sheet and body.)

As a limo driver, I regularly drove Orson Welles to Ma Maison and Larry Flynt to physical therapy after he was shot. I carried a wood board in the trunk for Flynt so he could slide directly from backseat to wheelchair. Welles rode up front because he was too obese to lift himself from the backseat.

Beverly Hills Hotel, California, circa 1950s. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

I bribed the dispatcher once to give me the call to drive Welles to his home in Vegas. I loaded up the genius, then bailed somewhere on Mulholland, telling a lie that a red "check engine" light had gone on and he’d have to take another car – the prospect of sitting next to him for hours was suddenly and inexplicably stressful.

I used to give rich out-of-towners fake tours of stars’ homes in Holmby Hills. I’d point to this house or that and say, "Sinatra. Lucille Ball. Jimmy Stewart." The addresses were available from curbside vendors but most of us were too bored or lazy to bother with veracity. One day, on a fake tour of Bel-Air, I saw a dishevelled man in a bathrobe in the middle of the street. I slowed and took a closer look and couldn’t believe my eyes: Brian Wilson. He asked if we had a light for his cigarette. The Texans were so thrilled they tipped me $100. I finally understood the cryptic, dadaist bumper stickers popular at the time: I BRAKE FOR BRIAN WILSON.

I drove agents who wouldn’t tip and other rude assholes (some of them writers) that I’d later be in business with. I drove the larcenous families of African royalty, the retinue of the Shah of Iran, Mick Jagger. I drove a fight promoter who lived in a hillside enclave called Mount Olympus to a nightclub in Watts, Mr Mitch’s Another World, and after that for scotch and eggs at a speakeasy run by Lou Rawls.

An east coast mobster paid me $500 to break into a house in the Hills he kept for his mistress, a B-movie actress who refused to decamp; Olivia de Havilland, who insisted I chase after ambulances if they passed with their sirens on ("Oh come on, Bruce, it’s newsworthy!"); hookers who gave blow jobs for tips; conmen who fled without paying at the end of the day. Andy Warhol, too. I still have a copy of his book, signed "To Bruce, The Best Driver. Andy." If Andy were alive, I like to think he’d amend his maxim to: "In the future, everyone will be famous all the time." Or maybe, "In the future, everyone will have unhackable privacy for 15 minutes."

My mother died in May and is buried in a crypt next to the legendary screenwriter Nunnally Johnson (The Grapes of Wrath), just around the corner from Marilyn Monroe. In my early 30s, Oliver Stone introduced me to Billy Wilder. I’ll never forget my frisson on learning that the original script of Sunset Boulevard began in a morgue, with the corpses all sharing how they met their ends. (It was shot but discarded because it didn’t sit well with preview audiences.) That scene was a thematic foretelling of my own corpus to come: phantoms telling stories around a campfire. William Holden begins his "share" as a ghost heard in voiceover while we see his floating corpse. Swimming pools have always been a thread that runs through my work. As a very young boy visiting California for the first time, I looked out the plane’s window with shock and wonder at the Elysian mosaic of blue backyard portals. In Maps to the Stars, a five-year-old drowns in one. Like his great-grandfather Holden, he becomes a ghost, but sadly has had no life to share.

‘I’ve given you the lay of the land as I see it, saw it, and lived it’ … a view of Hollywood in 1951. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

I mention all this because its weave is the leitmotif informing David Cronenberg’s film of my script Maps to the Stars. Contrary to critics’ easy characterisation, it doesn’t have a satirical bone in its elegiac, messy, hysterical body. I’ve given you the lay of the land as I see it, saw it, and lived it. Maps is the saga of a doomed actress, haunted by the spectre of her legendary mother; of a child star ruined by early celebrity, fallen prey to addiction and the hallucination of phantoms; of the mutilation, both real and metaphorical, sometimes caused by fame and its attendants – riches, shame and nightmare. I see our movie as a ghost play, not a satire.

Tap to the top … Bruce Wagner as a child. Photograph: Bruce Wagner

Hemingway spoke of an incident that happened at a Manhattan hotel. A socialite read in the paper that Papa was having trouble raising funds for a safari. She visited his room and said she’d pay for everything with the proviso she accompany him and his wife on the trip. He turned her down. But Hemingway began to wonder what might have become of a man who made such an agreement. From those musings came The Snows of Kilimanjaro – the death of a writer enslaved by money. Sunset Boulevard explores that theme and lies outside the realm of satire as well. Maps attempts a raucous confabulation of Wilder’s landscape along with the bitchy brutalities of Orton and Strindberg. I’m nothing if not ambitious.

David Cronenberg has said he has no interest in vivisecting Hollywood mores and manners and neither do I. The thought of an industry satire makes me vomit. At the time I wrote Maps to the Stars, I was a journeyman Pat Hobby on the road to ruin. I was in possession of a cubbyhole office in the far outfield of Paramount, bestowed on the strength of a hot comedy I had written that had been shot but never released and was deemed to be unsalvageable, due to its director’s spiralling addictions. Like a golden loser, I ordered up private screenings for "research" and killed time by watching childhood faves such as The Time Machine and Journey to the Centre of the Earth while popping Darvons and eating Commissary box lunches. To stay sane, I began writing fiction, creating the alter ego of a failed chauffeur-screenwriter, Bud Wiggins. Mr Stone eventually asked me to adapt my first book, the self-published collection Force Majeure: The Bud Wiggins Stories. I wrote a screenplay I hated, since I thought no one would make a film of a script that I loved. When Oliver surprised me by saying I should direct it, I found myself in an existential bind worthy of the character I’d conjured – as the greedy, for-hire hack I was, I had cheesily adapted the bravest, most authentic writing I was capable of. I couldn’t go through with it. So I rewrote the script, knowing that the new draft, a cri de coeur, was unmakeable. That it wouldn’t become a movie until more than 20 years later didn’t matter. I wrote Maps to the Stars and was liberated.

Ghost stories … cast and crew of Maps to the Stars at Toronto film festival. Photograph: Jeff Vespa/WireImage

"It’s all ending now," says Agatha to her brother at the end of our film. The prodigal daughter has returned to atone for her parents’ sins by sending the entire family to the ghostly realms whence she came. Sometimes the dead are more real, more enviable than the living, because they no longer have the crushing task of playing out the storyline that kills them. Cronenberg knows this, sees this, feels this. The dead are liberated from story and exist for the living as … maps to the stars.

It is our birthright – we are all ghosts around Wilder’s campfire morgue, telling stories of how we arrived, and stories of our leavetakings, too.

I can’t wait to hear the next one.