Elisa Albert

EARLY AUTOBIOGRAPHY VIA PROXIMITY TO FAME, OR WHEN PEOPLE ASK WHAT IT WAS LIKE GROWING UP IN L.A.

The guy who played Ross on Friends grew up next door. His parents were lawyers who swore the property values couldn’t get any higher, so they sold too soon. Lynda Carter, who was Wonder Woman, bought our house when we moved. My middle brother’s nursery school classmates included Gwyneth Paltrow and Maya Rudolph. His best friend in grade school was Guy Oseary, who went on to manage Madonna and U2. A friend of that brother’s from high school went on to a role in a TV show, but I always forget the guy’s name. The show was “Suits,” co-starring Meghan Markle, aka Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Sussex.

The Marciano family, who owned Guess, lived on our block in the flats of Beverly Hills in the ’80s. The Marciano kids were all cool and nice and everyone rode skateboards, and I remember walking around the neighborhood in gangs all the time, in and out of one another’s houses. The flats of Beverly Hills in the ’80s were weirdly utopian. I was terrible at skateboarding, but I never got badly hurt. A bunch of us were obsessed with the little green buds on impatiens bushes you could pop with gentle pressure so that they exploded with seeds. “Poppers,” we called them, and spent hours roaming the streets in search of them. Or maybe that was just me.

Ariel Rosenberg was in my class at Jewish day school; he grew up to become punk musician Ariel Pink. Elisa Boren, also in our class, was known as Elisa B (I was Elisa A). She was a sweetheart. She married the lead singer of a band called Linkin Park, which I hear is pretty bad.

I wrote a fan letter to Judy Blume; she sent me a form letter in response.

My father dated a woman who was “best friends” with Jane Fonda, and we went to the premiere of some movie Fonda was in, and I was sucking on a Tootsie Pop and Fonda laughed and said, “Now that’s the way to come to a movie premiere: with a lollipop!” and I liked her a whole lot. I was eleven.

I wrote a fan letter to Patti LuPone; she sent me a signed headshot in return.

I wrote a fan letter to Carol Burnett; she didn’t respond. I must have had a thing for redheads. My aunt was a (fake) redhead. My aunt was also a semi-secret lesbian, and everyone made fun of her all the time. In my family it was open season on lesbians, fat people, and people without children.

Tori Spelling was a senior when I was a seventh grader at an exclusive all-girls school. She had the best collection of whimsical boxer shorts, which everyone wore under tailored uniform miniskirts. She was very sweet and guileless, it seemed to me, but even then I knew she’d look better if she just let her hair be its natural color and texture.

My father’s girlfriend’s daughter had a walk-on part in Beverly Hills, 90210, on the Very Special episode wherein a kid accidentally shoots himself whilst playing with a gun. She also had a walk-on in the Doors movie starring Val Kilmer. I worshipped her. Eventually her mom and my dad broke up, and I never saw or heard from her again, and I was sad about it for years. Then one day I found her on Facebook, and it appeared she had turned out to be highly basic after all, complete with chemically straightened hair and pseudo-glam shot, so I was finally cured of those particular feelings of loss.

An elderly former actress lived next door to my grandma in an apartment complex in Sherman Oaks. I was Gone-With-The-Wind-obsessed and got my hands on a cheesy mass-market paperback entitled Gable’s Women, about the many women Clark Gable had romanced. I carried that book with me everywhere, loved reading about Gable’s sex life. So here’s a strange coincidence: the elderly former actress who lived next door to my grandma turned out to be one of Gable’s former paramours! Her name was Virginia Grey. Her headshot from 1943 was featured in the middle of Gable’s Women. Grandma invited her over to have tea. She was thin and stern and beautiful and elegant and dignified and palsied. She wore a black turtleneck with a string of cinnabar and amber beads. She had grown up in Hollywood. One of her babysitters had been a young Gloria Swanson. Wikipedia says she was featured in over 100 movies from the ’30s through the ’80s. She was under contract to MGM. She died in 2004 at the Motion Picture and Television Retirement Community in Woodland Hills, and her ashes were scattered at sea.

I gained admittance to a Jewish performing arts troupe when I was thirteen. We traveled around town doing original variety shows at synagogues. It felt very professional and ludicrously exciting. When I was younger, I had seen one of their shows and thought this troupe was the most legendarily awesome thing I had ever been near. One of their ballads, based on Hebrew liturgy, reliably moved me to tears. A cute girl from this troupe wound up starring on a Nickelodeon show called All That.

When Frank Sinatra died, I was hanging out at a frozen yogurt place in the valley with some of my Jewish performing arts friends, and along came a CBS news crew, doing a man-on-the-street thing.

The CBS guy asked: Do you know who Frank Sinatra was?

Of course, I said. Ol’ Blye Eyes!

They used that clip on the next day’s news. I was fourteen.

Ira Newborn, who did the soundtracks to all my most beloved John Hughes films, lived around the corner from my mom and went to her shul. He was probably in his fifties then, and single, and looking for someone with whom he might start a family. I was in awe of him because he had masterminded the sonic genius of Sixteen Candles, and I was newly of childbearing age, and I wondered if, because he seemed friendly and nice and interested in talking to me at Shabbes dinners, I might be a wife candidate. Surely there were worse fates than living in Brentwood and bearing children for a musical genius. Everyone was always telling me I was mature for my age.

My mother chauffeured me to a lot of doctor’s appointments because there was a lot allegedly wrong with me. My complexion wasn’t wonderful, for one. The dermatologist was nice enough, though he saw fit to put me on a horrific acne drug, which has since been shown to actually alter DNA, and I had to take the birth control pill alongside it, despite being not remotely sexually active, because the horrific acne drug could warp fetuses in the most extraordinary ways. In hindsight, an interesting course of treatment for an otherwise perfectly healthy teenaged girl. This same doctor treated Michael Jackson for vitiligo, and his receptionist, Debbie Rowe, became egg donor and surrogate for Jackson’s children.

Steven Spielberg’s stepdaughter was two grades ahead of me. Maggie Gyllenhaal was one grade ahead of me. Jake Gyllenhaal was one grade behind me. Jason Segel, too, but he wasn’t famous yet. We played mother and son in an Edward Albee play. Also at school: the sons of Neil Diamond and Randy Newman. I had a crush on the son of Randy Newman, but didn’t really know who Randy Newman was. I had crushes on a lot of people. I don’t think anyone had a crush on me.

Maggie G. came to my house for a party. A lot of cool people were at my house that night, and I got stinking drunk because I was freaking out about all the cool people being at my house. Toward the end of the night, I found myself alone in the fetal position on my bedroom floor in the dark. The door opened, and Maggie came in to check on me. No, just kidding, she only wanted to use my phone. She flipped on the light switch, stepped over me, stretched out on my bed, and called her mom to relay a litany of boyfriend troubles while I remained in the fetal position on the floor. When she was done talking on the phone, she got up, looked in the mirror for a while, stepped back over me, turned off the lights, and exited the room.

I was going to play Adelaide in Guys and Dolls senior year. I was going to hit it out of the park. But I didn’t get the part. The drama teacher was very into his proximity to celebrity, so he cast all his shows with names. Tyrone Power’s granddaughter got Adelaide. Tyrone Power’s granddaughter didn’t even seem that interested in theater! Rumor had it she had been coerced by the drama teacher into auditioning! Plus her voice kinda sucked! I was way pissed. I had crushed “Adelaide’s Lament” in tryouts. I wrote an anonymous letter to the school newspaper, critiquing the drama teacher’s methodology/starfucking. It caused quite a stir. Everyone knew I had written the letter.

I saw Al Pacino out in Santa Monica somewhere one night. The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, I want to say it was. He was smoking. I casually asked if I could bum a cigarette. He stared at me with great intensity, did not move a muscle in his face, pulled a single cig from his pack of Camel Lights, and extended it out to me, all without saying a word or breaking gaze. I said thanks, and bolted. I put that cig into a Ziploc baggie and pinned it to my bulletin board and occasionally fondled it for a long time thereafter. A decade went by before I finally smoked it, out my old bathroom window, on a visit home. It was stale.

I was carted off to a couple different psychologists. One of these psychologists was a rather underwhelming lady who some years later was named in all the gossip rags for having been the one to commit Britney Spears to an involuntary stay at a mental hospital after a forty-five-minute consultation.

Prom night a group of us had a suite at the Sunset Tower Hotel. Down the hall was Dave Gahan from Depeche Mode, and he wound up in our suite, wanting to “party” with us. I recall his ghostly pallor and sunken eyes and greasy hair. He was talking a mile a minute. I didn’t know who he was. Later that night he OD’d down the hall. We found out about it the next day. He lived.

The son of the guy who founded Noah’s Bagels was in my year at Brandeis. I was fat and possibly a lesbian and one of my brothers died and everyone told me how fat I was at his funeral (in the cemetery where Al Jolson is buried (h/t Amy Hempel), and Dinah Shore, and Max Ritvo now too, out by LAX), and I was pretty sure I was at least partly lesbian, and I knew that being fat plus being even a smidge lesbian meant I should probably just kill myself ASAP, so it was interesting to just, like, sit with that.

I sat next to Grace Paley at dinner after a reading. The professor who’d brought her to campus believed in my writing, and seated me with Paley, who was very old and very shrunken and utterly without pretension. She chewed her food like a working-class girl from the Bronx. I loved her profoundly.

That summer I worked in the mailroom at the William Morris Agency. My mom’s friend’s father had once been head of the Agency. Everyone who works at William Morris has to start in the mailroom, per the decree of the founders, so that everyone who rises through the ranks has a foundational understanding of its bottom-up workings. The agents-to-be were vaguely condescending, slick young men in suits. It was the dispatcher I loved. Beefy, soft-spoken guy, amused by the goings on around him, not on his way up, satisfied with his lot: a lifer. When everyone else was out on mail runs, I’d sit on his lap and we’d get all flushed and giggly.

I almost went to Israel to work in the Jewish Peace Corps after college, agonized throughout the majority of that year’s notebook about whether or not I should go to the Middle East and be Of Service, but I said fuck it, and moved to New York instead, to work some shitty jobs and Become A Writer, at which point my proximity to fame and fortune exploded, to the extent that I became permanently jaded, finding it absolutely pathetic, to say nothing of existentially crushing and spiritually bereft and morally suspect, when people even subtly attempt to name-drop for any reason, in any context whatsoever, so… the end.

ELISA ALBERT is the author of two novels and a story collection. She has worked as a doula, English professor, barista, and religious school teacher.