MOTHER’S DIARY

May 12, 2012 ~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

Hollywood Hollywood (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The diary my mother never wrote is from what I read in the FBI surveillance reports, newspaper articles and what my father told me. My mother’s emotion’s and thoughts erupt from years of research, intuition and imagination. When I was eleven she gave me a diary. I’ve been writing ever since. I wanted my daughter or son to understand who I was, in case I died young like her. Instead I became dedicated to writing not childbearing.

I think every mother should keep a diary for her children.

Manhattan, December 1944

I am dancing at the Copacabana Night club for the next few weeks. This tiny smoky club is filled with many interesting people. It’s different from any modeling job.

I’m tired after working all day and night, and then taking the train back home to West Orange. Some of the girls are staying at the Barbizon Hotel, so I may also if it’s not too expensive.

Last night, a group of men were seated in the front row. I didn’t know who they were, but this one stared at me all through the show. He sent a bouquet of long-stemmed roses backstage and asked me to meet him for a drink.

When I declined, he was very insistent, and so persuasive I gave in. Later on, I found out he was seated with Frank Costello, the gangster. His name is Allen, and he asked me to dine with him the following night. I hesitated again, and I’m not sure why. He made me laugh and entertained everyone at the table.

January 1944

A talent agent from Hollywood came to the Copa to see all of us dance. Mum is so excited she is already telling everyone in town, I hate when she does this.

Allen called and I agreed to dine with him. We went to El Morocco. He knows so many people. He says he’s in the film business, but there’s talk amongst the girls that he’s a gangster.

March 1944

I’m going to Hollywood for an audition. Swifty Lazar, the one that came to the Copa to see our show, said MGM is signing musical actors. They liked my photos. Allen lives in Hollywood, and is handling all the details. He’s become very interested in my career. It’s all so sudden. There isn’t time to think.

April 1944

I spent a week in Hollywood. Allen drove me all over the city, took me to Santa Monica to see the ocean, to the nightclubs on Sunset Boulevard, and Beverly Hills.

It’s like a dream. I love the city, and MGM has offered me a contract. Again, Allen is helping me make decisions and understand the film business. I don’t know what he does, but he carries a lot of cash. He gets very disturbed when I question him. I met his friend Benjamin Siegel. They are both so handsome and get anything they want.

Summer 1944

We are moving out to California next month. Allen found an apartment in Beverly Hills for us, near where sister Pat can go to High School. She’s so excited. One of the models told me Ben Siegel is a gangster. I wish Allen would open up to me more.

When we moved, our new apartment was on a beautiful street. The apartment is smaller than home, and Mum misses her garden, but she seems happy. She found a Church she likes. She is going to learn to drive.

I have already learned to drive and am saving for a car. Allen knows someone who sells cars, and said he can get me a very good deal. Sometimes, I don’t hear from him for a week, and then he shows up on the studio set with presents.

Allen, Ben and George Raft were arrested for bookmaking. George called and said it wasn’t like the papers wrote, and that Allen would call me when he could.

I’m not to discuss this with anyone. I hid the paper from Mum.

George took me out to dinner. He wants me to be in a movie with him called Nocturne. He’s very fond of Allen and said not to believe what I read in the papers.

Next week we begin filming “Ziegfeld Follies.” Fred Astaire is magnificent to watch. Life is spinning. There is no time to read, or even think. Everyone in Hollywood wants to be a star. I still daydream of going to college one day.

November 1944

I am in love with Allen. There is no turning back. He is Jewish, and his family lives in Winnipeg, Canada. He won’t talk of them, but said he loved his mother.

I wonder so often about his life, but I cannot ask questions. Maybe one day he’ll trust me more. He’s suspicious of everyone. He said he’s going to marry me when his life settles down.

THE POST OFFICE AND FACEBOOK

May 10, 2012May 10, 2012 ~ LouLou ~ 2 Comments

About the post office, it’s a relic, a dying old fortress of communication, where we all stood in line at one time to send our letters, the ones that took us a few more minutes than we can afford today. I wrote a lot of letters, long five page letters written on delicate stationary, and art cards I bought in museums and boutiques.

The Post Office loses 96 million dollars a day according to a reporter on television. We have stopped buying stamps, because we don’t mail letters. We don’t even need to send packages, because we buy it online and let them ship it directly. The cards are printed by the shipper, and impersonally attached to the gift. The type is formal, and even though you know that person, had his mind on you for the minute they typed out that note, well, it’s not the same really. Progress is raping us of the personal touch. People like Zuckerberg are reinventing the way we share our thoughts, our photos, our everything.

Letters, of people that acquired prominence in the world of literature, art, and science were adapted into books. I wonder if their emails will be considered for a book.

The postman still comes to the house, he’s usually talking on his cell phone, or listening to his iPod, when he drops the mail off. There is no need to rush to see what he’s brought, it’s always the same, a stack of bills, a few discount fliers, and a real estate brokerage announcement that they can sell our house in thirty days. The postman has changed too. They used to say hello, and have a nice day. I suppose if I wanted to have a conversation with the Postman I could go to their Facebook page.

I’m going to check, and see if they have a Facebook page…. The first three Facebook post offices: one in the UK, one in St Louis, and one in Pakistan. Clicked more, and there they are. You can Facebook the Post office.

UNCERTAINTY LOULOU

May 8, 2012 ~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

UNCERTAINTY LOULOU.

UNCERTAINTY LOULOU

May 8, 2012 ~ LouLou ~ 2 Comments

Morning comes after two cups of French Press. I sit here at the desk, peeking out the glass door to the shady side of the street. I do not know where I will be living, what I will be doing, or who I will be doing it with next month. Uncertainly, I move in and out of situations and get swept up in my ideas and fantasies. I buy and sell, make and remake, move-in, move-out, leave homes, careers, friends and relationships. I move out of comfort

art nouveau dome of light (Photo credit: e³°°°)

and into uncertainty because it feels more like home moving than staying in one place.

I have to put the words on the paper and look at it to make it real.

Raising a family, sprouting barriers and responsibilities might have changed me, but I didn’t. I’m unchanged in some ways, still running through the hallways of the hotels, gardens, and neighborhoods. Do you know what I mean?

LEVON HELM DIED… DID ANYONE KNOW THAT

May 4, 2012 ~ LouLou ~ 1 Comment

I have this greatest love for The Band.. brought on by a listen when I was about seventeen.

My two best friends, Lizzie and Billy. Billy played the guitar, from Tulsa, so he got it, and his sister Lizzie sang.

I sat crossed legged in her English boudoir bedroom in Bel Air, and knew they were the musical advisories. I never may have known the Band if it wasn’t for them.

How come no one has spoken about Levon? Are we too obsessed with mediocrity? How did our tastes vanish into

CNN.

Now it’s the Kardasian, whatever her name is. Who cares. Why? What happened to us?

I loved you Levon. I love you The Band. It breaks my heart.

EDITS AND REVISIONS IN THE GARDEN

April 28, 2012April 30, 2012 ~ LouLou ~ 1 Comment

East Palace Avenue Santa Fe (Photo credit: paigeh)

SMILEY’S DICE-ADVENTURES IN LIVINGNESS

By:Luellen Smiley

SANTA FE,NM.

I’m sitting outside in a flowerless garden because no matter how many flowers I plant, they only last one season, if that long. The garden is erupting out of its winter coat, and lime green leaves, plants, and stalks will have to do for now. The sky that seals me in is licked with revisionary hope. The kind that comes back laundered and fresh after a chosen recess from believing in the possibility of a preferred life correction.

Behind the garden, a neighbor is drumming a soft tribal beat, and on Palace Avenue the choir is singing inside the Episcopal Church on Palace Avenue. Between these distinctive tastes, there are sparrows fluttering from fan to nest to fountain. The chattering sounds like; ‘here she comes, don’t come over here, get out of my nest, watch out for that fat crow.’

It’s a mind drift, to be caught in such UN-structured beauty, away from the manuscripts, remotes, doors, and phones. It’s like being on an island out here. Everything we bring into our experience can be revised; a work of art, a way of speaking, thinking, portraying yourself, your way of loving, or lusting, and we all know about appearance, because our society shoves it down our throat.

Look at the possibilities in revising our patterns of behavior. What we accepted twenty years ago doesn’t mean it’s carved in our organs. We can transmute. The interior life needs lifting and tightening, just as our mind and muscles do. You won’t find any immediate remedy, or advertisements, or books on the subject because we’re consumers of products that change and revise only the visible tangibles. I wonder if I traded in my eleven year old Land Rover for a new one if I’d be really happy, and for how long? Or if I flew to Los Angeles and bought cartons of antiques, hats, and perfume if I would be grinning from ear to ear.

I begin with revising the way I experience Santa Fe. I’ve lived on the outskirts, like a storm that blew in and is waiting to blow out. It seems my storm is here for now, and so I let go of the criticism and intolerances. Beginning with my favorite activity, dancing, I returned to El Farol, my chosen dance hall hullabaloo, then to La Posada across the street and mingled with an assorted group of locals, guests, and actors, (who were real as pippin apples)spent a day cruzing the ghostly town of Madrid to experience the cinematic sparseness, and walked up and down Canyon Road one morning before the shops opened, and was greeted half a dozen times by strangers out walking, uniquely different in attire, disposition and stride. I love that about Santa Fe. You don’t conform, it’s a religion here!

My homework for the next few weeks is revising the interior doors of emotion, and the exterior doors of expression. I’ve set aside the memoir, (did I mention I started that again) after a publisher suggested major rewrites and editing. I mean you have to know when to give up because you’re not going to make the team. I’m a six page essayist. If you get me into one hundred and fifty pages, I march all over the globe and lose the reader.

You guys are smart. You know all of this; I’m just learning. I am a case of insufferable arrested development. If I felt my age, which most of you know, I’d be looking at retirement brochures. Instead I’m planning on breaking into new territory. Its a joke between my dreamer self and my inner critic, but I’m not listening to the critic.

Today I swiveled in my desk chair trying to write the column I thought I was going to write. In between gazing out the window at sky scenery, I made oatmeal cookies, watched the birds, took care of business, had a hair cut, plucked at paragraphs from Anais Nin, and danced on the treadmill. The column didn’t come out of a conscious thought wave; it just rose up, after I typed the words, the throw of the dice. The odds were I’d find my way from there.

My dad the gambler, who laid a bet on everything from sports, horses, gaming, to the Academy Awards and elections, taught me many valuable lessons. He actually told me once, ‘Take a chance for heavens sake! Go out and get arrested.’ He knew the odds of that, which is why he dared me. Life corrections begin with edits, then revisions, and then you have a new story!

Any dice to throw email:folliesls@aol.com

THE MEMOIR IN PROGRESS

April 24, 2012June 20, 2014 ~ LouLou ~ 3 Comments

MY HOODLUM SAINT

WHERE TO BEGIN THIS STORY OF A FATHER THAT I ONLY CAME TO UNDERSTAND BY READING HIS FBI FILES, BOOKS ABOUT MOB HISTORY WRITTEN BY LAW ENFORCEMENT AND COLLEGE PROFESSORS, AND DOCUMENTARIES PRODUCED BY FOES OF MY FATHER.

My last year with Dad was 1981. Naive, and unconcerned with where I was headed, or how I’d get there if I figured it out, I was spinning around in an executive chair; waiting for the big hand on the black and white office clock to set me free. Time didn’t pass; I hauled it over my head, in my bland windowless office, under florescent glare. I was trouble shooting for an ambitious group of USC guys as they gobbled up all of Los Angeles real estate. Without any real sense of survival or independence, my life was in the hands of my father.

“Meyer’s coming to see me; haven’t seen the little guy in twenty-five years.” Dad said during a commercial break.

“Meyer Lansky?” I asked as casually as he’d spoken.

“Who else?”

“Why did you two wait so long?”

“It’s no concern of yours; he’s my friend, not yours.” I was twenty-nine years old and still verbally handcuffed.

The three of us went out to dinner, and while the two of them spoke in clipped short wave syndicate code, I

noticed that neither one of them looked at all happy. It was rare to catch my father in public with a friend, without raucous laughter, and storytelling. My attempt to revive the dinner conversation with my own humor,returned two sets of silent eyeball commands to resist speaking.

Several months later I received a call from Dad asking me to come over to his apartment, he had collapsed on the bathroom floor. When I arrived, he pleaded for me to stay close by. “I’ll be all right in a few minutes; I just need to catch my breath. ” I sat outside the bathroom door biting my nails, and waited, like our dog Spice, for my orders. For the first time in my life, he was weaker than I, and my turmoil centered on that unfamiliar reversal of roles.

THANK YOU

April 14, 2012April 14, 2012 ~ LouLou ~ 1 Comment

I apologize for not thanking you, but you the readers make writers like me keep on

writing. I really appreciate you following me, my unraveling THE interior life, the life

inside of us, that is raw and uncensored. THANK YOU!

FILLING UP ON STUFF

April 13, 2012April 13, 2012 ~ LouLou ~ 1 Comment

If undeniable love only happens once, and then it’s gone, what do you do? Shop, count your money, travel, remodel your kitchen, volunteer, protest, have babies, read, or disappear into your illusions, and your art. Be enlightened, shine in your art, in what you loved always, in the froth of life.

THE MIND HIKE & MUSIC

April 10, 2012March 25, 2025 ~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

Joe Bataan - Ordinary Guy (1975) — Joe Bataan – Ordinary Guy (1975) (Photo credit: Soul Portrait)

I WISH I’D TAKEN A PHOTO THAT DAY, on a gravely, twisted uphill hike to Mt Atalaya a hike that I’ve hungered for because it looms in the rear view, jettisoned above the city, swooping hills, three of them, you have to criss-cross before you reach the 8,800 foot marker in the sky. The temperature was 70 degrees, the wind was napping. Easter Sunday, sprinkles of holiness on Santa Fe, church bells ringing all day long, restaurants hosts pushing metal carts of glossy preparations down the aisles, and the little children, in Easter bonnets, and patent leather shoes, if they still make them, are squirming at the table.

I had a hunger for universal meaninglessness and to end the chatter in my head. Hikes do that. They just erase all the sirens and alarms, the what if’s and what knots in my head.

Afterward, we sat on the porch listening to Joe Bataan. You probably haven’t heard of him unless you dig into Salsa, as Rudy does. Joe is half Filipino and half African. His music touches cords you cannot even imagine, like Afro-Cuban-Filipino fusion rap. Everyone is hopeful on Easter; motor bikers, wanderers, the wait staff and valet that trot down the street, talking into their ear phones at one another, and guests, pushing baby strollers, swinging shopping bags, taking photographs of our house, and gazing at the sky. When they hear the music from our porch, they wave at us, and might think, we have the life, sitting on the porch, sipping a glass of wine. What they cannot even imagine is that the entire scene is Roman a clef, a fictional imitation! What we are actually doing is avoiding the avalanche. We were already defaulted on the mortgage, and then we repositioned into a vacation rental. And guests sat on our porch while we took the maid’s entrance. Hah

LOVERS IN YOUR LIFE

April 8, 2012April 9, 2012 ~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes I skim through the works in progress folder and stumble upon something I never finished. This is from that folder, started in 2004.

They make the best friends, and you never have to wonder what it’s like to make love to them… lovers from the past are not forgotten, and if they are, then they were not true loves, they were just flings. In my life, lovers have remained in my heart in a separate compartment, just as their letters, and photographs and mementos are kept in separate stationary boxes in my trunk.

Some lovers keep in touch with me, and others vanished after the break-up. Last month two former lovers contacted me. One from 1977, and one in 1984. I have always said one man is not enough; I need three or four circulating my life. Even if I was married, my mantra of ‘the more men the better’ would not be negotiable, and today, that holds true. I’ve been advised by Rudy, that men will read this and assume that I am intimate with my men friends; and I said not all men will, and he said, oh yea, that’s how men think.

This is a story of lovers reuniting, in different cities than where they met, older, refined in sentiment, and loved in a capacity greater than they once were, as lovers. To be continued.

THE COLOR RED IS THE COLOR BLUE

April 2, 2012 ~ LouLou ~ 10 Comments

I have to turn the clock back to 1996, to the days of peeling back the first layer of family history. I was sitting at a dining room table in a casita in Taos, NM. It was winter, the first time I’d lived in snow outside a few teenage weekends in Arrowhead. Snow silence that sucks up every imaginable sound, and the absence of any neighbors, I was the only resident in the compound, left me to unravel a secret life, the one my father guarded with irreproachable tenacity.

The first layer came off from the Immigration and Naturalization (INS) files on Allen smiley, birth name Aaron Smehoff, tagged “Armed and Dangerous.”

Allen married, Irene on January 16, 1926, (my father’s nineteenth birthday), in San Francisco. On July 18, 1926 Allen was arrested for robbery in a drug store on Geary Street with another unidentified boy who fled the scene. On September 17, 1926, Allen was convicted of first degree robbery and confined to Preston Reformatory for boys in Ione, California. On November 23, 1926 Irene, who remained in Oakland, gave birth to a baby girl, named Loretta. Allen was released from Preston Reformatory in December of 1927. He returned to Oakland to reunite with his wife and child; but they had vanished. This is what the INS gathered from Dad in an INS hearing. I read from the court transcripts of that hearing, about 300 pages of interrogation and the answers’ in my Dad’s own voice.

The snow sedated the choppy feeling in my stomach, the jaggedness of suddenly discovering, why my father was wired with anxiety. His whole life was occupy Allen Smiley; arrest him, convict him, send him to Russia, and never pull the tap from his apartment, or the FBI guys from his tail.

When I ordered all those government files I had no idea that the government probed into personal lives as much as criminal activities. They recorded all the household conversations, arguments with my mother, his betting on the phone, his visitors, discussions with his housekeeper about the ashtrays, and his hatred for the government, “I wish somebody would drop a bomb, just to get rid of some of these guys.”

What would I say to this daughter now in her eighties, about the father she never knew?

It was a one of a kind experience, to pick up the phone and speak with Chris, the granddaughter, who discovered me from my columns. She went looking for the other Smiley daughter, and confronted her own family secret. The tension cross-circuited our conversation, both of us heaving with questions, anxious for an answer to the family puzzle, the answers we could not wait to get, that I cannot share, even though the names are changed, I do honor the right to privacy.

I paced the room moving unconsciously from one place to another, reaching for my father’s voice to soothe her, rewrite history in between dusk and making dinner. Then the unveiling of the tragedy; the loss and the family shame, surrounding a marriage to a gangster, a father whom they never got to know, as I did. In the passing of an hour or less, my voice resonated the stories of her grandfather; his health and humor, his disciplinary regulations, and his life long battle to remain anonymous, in the public eye of organized crime.

Chris asked if I wanted to speak with Loretta, my half-sister, and I said of course I would. She set up a phone call for the following Sunday,
with a forewarning that her grandmother did not encourage the communication, or the research, she was beyond asking for a resurgence of truth or pain. How does one retrace seventy or eighty years of believing the color red may be the color blue or least a bluish tint. Loretta was not proud of what she read about Allen Smiley.

In the days before the arranged phone call I sifted through my internal index of Dad’s history, and what might console her. I could tell her about the time, he sat me down in the living room, to discuss sex with a gentle sternness;

“ Once you get pregnant your whole life changes, and you’re not even close to being ready for that. It happened to a gal I loved, when I was a young man.”

Was that Loretta’s mother he was speaking about? When this young love of his said she was pregnant, he tried to persuade her against it, because he wasn’t “properly financed.” So I asked him what happened.

“We’re not talking about my life; I’m trying to get you to understand the consequences of sex. You see God made the act beautiful so we would procreate, and if you ignore the consequences, you’re not fulfilling God’s wishes.”

I waited by the phone until it was time to accept that the call wasn’t coming. During that time of waiting, I tried to walk in Loretta’s shoes. I only had to take a few steps to comprehend the combustion of emotions she’d face by having a Sunday evening chat with me.

I made the choice to be public, to be viewed by strangers all over the world, and to receive their rage as well as their rewards.

It wasn’t a year ago that I received an email from the most distant of childhood memories. The email came from Inga, our first Nanny. The last time she saw me I was six years old. She sent me photos of us in the backyard at Bel Air, photos of her watching over me on the swings. She told me by letter, that my father was so good to her, so generous, and she loved being a part of our family. “I had no idea he was involved in anything criminal, and even if he was, it wouldn’t have mattered because he was such a kind man.” The color red is also the color blue, and because of my Dad, I learned to accept the contradictions in all of us.

Our interior life is uncensored, unsuitable to guidance from our parents, our husbands and wives, our lovers; it is uniquely you, red and blue.