No one ever entered the Beverly Hills Tennis Club through the front gate facing Maple Drive, with spindly Maple trees out of a bright Tim Burton film lining the block. The façade of the club was black and white, classic and clean, with the Beverly Hills Tennis Club written in iconic typeface. It was old school Beverly Hills, which makes me laugh because I was not even nine years old investigating a sex scandal that I was in at this location, and I didn’t really realize that. I don’t know how old I was, exactly.
Everybody pulled into the back alleyway behind the club— that’s where the parking lot was. A security guard was on duty by the gate, so it was more discreet and secure. All this discretion, I thought, at nine years old, why? I had so many questions, cruising up Maple Drive in an ’81 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. In the car, I was listening to “Sacrifice” by Elton John and fighting with my father. I had just gotten to this world, evidently, and I was amazed, truly, by how everyone claimed to know “how things worked” when I was operating under the understanding that nothing had to work that way, exactly. I came from an “other” scenario, not a story one heard every day, though today, sex scandals are a dime a dozen, but still. It was unexpected.
Just like my father’s car:
I pulled up to the Beverly Hills Tennis Club in an ‘81 Cutlass Supreme, not a Mercedes. It’s not to say that I was poor, because I wasn’t, but I was not from Beverly Hills. That was Dr. J’s vehicle. She was a businesswoman. Hungry for the cash. And that, since I was investigating all this, flipped the most basic expectations. My parents flipped the most basic ideas about who made the money, even, so, I became aware of expectations early on, conceptually. It was one of my files in my drawer. My father was also 60 years my senior. Not to say there aren’t older parents, but the average person wasn’t expecting my father to be that old, wasn’t expecting this story to fall out of my mouth.
Strangely, it was my mother’s money that paid for this sex scandal, which made it “okay” that she had money as if…someone…didn’t work for that money, regardless of when their children came into the play. I was always confused about the attitudes we hold about money. A touchy subject. Fascinating to a nine-year-old. I had no clue what the fuck was going on. But Dr. J wasn’t some rich housewife in Bel-Air putting on some absurd fantasy play in boudoir clothing. Joan Crawford, I don’t know. I didn’t have a relationship with any of it, but people did — people had very set, preconceived notions about what “The Beverly Hills Tennis Club” might have meant. I was aware that people held narratives that might not be true—my mother was Dr. J. Psychology seized me, it really did, as a subject, the truth, especially, as that was a folder in my drawer.
One could have cast a variety of assumptions about me, her, them, the club, though we want to be seen beyond these pre-set ideas. I saw expectations as a structural entity with potentially damaging results. I would run up against them, inside myself, too.
The car door opened of an iconic lowrider. I stepped outside of the Cutlass Supreme. I was wearing Payless shoes most of the time. I didn’t have all my adult teeth yet. I had a short, awkward haircut as I had met a couple of Delilahs already, and so, I was Samson, not Bathsheba. I headed straight for the columns with awkwardly chopped off hair— architecture. Psychology.
I waved to the security guard; I knew the code. He knew me. After opening the gate, I walked down the long, shady corridor. The mainstage tennis court ran alongside me. A player bounced on his feet—fierce. Up close, his body vibrated; it was so full of force. The intensity of his body dulled, however, the further I moved away from the game. This story, I believe, automatically had that effect. It appeared more like a cake walk at a distance, a TV show. But we were in that dynamic and physical of a house on Miracle Mile— the Leibowitz’s were sports stars. My mother, too, existed in a heightened state of play. This was a dramatic group of people, already a step or a few beyond normal personalities, whatever that means, but it was a theatrical group.
Emerging from the corridor into broad daylight, the sun smacked that club. The red terracotta tiles baked red hot. I spent the last four years of my life here; I came all the time with Angelica. A chic collection of floppy umbrellas with battlements for trim populated the restaurant terrace. The frosted glass tables evoked a little chill. There were five hard courts in total. The mainstage ran along the pool, glossy like a page out of a magazine. It was the cleanest shade of crystal blue, like the coolest invitation, against the red tiles. Two courts were on either side of the white shack—the workout room. To my right, the stairs ascended, turned at a sharp angle, and climbed up to the changing rooms— nothing fancy. The dining room on the ground floor, encased in glass, was my favorite room with a plush hunter green interior and crisp white table cloths. The silence in that room was so soothing, felt damp. There were two courts behind the restaurant. A magnolia tree, I can’t remember, or a gardenia stood as a natural statue over the terrace. Waxy leaves. White flowers. I could never penetrate who came here. But it made the concept of a façade apparent; a façade was a real thing, hard to explain. I didn’t assume that only wealthy families came here, I didn’t know, that was my fundamental guiding post. I did not know. I hated assumptions, expectations, talk of how the world worked. I would have to make peace with some of that, but I had no clue. I didn’t even know how to assume, in fact. Sure, there were people with money, but I never had an idea as to what it was supposed to look like. The “we’re all in a meat suit” mentality was mine from day one pretty much. I had no idea what this place was and what we were doing in it. “Who are you?” I asked my father that. “I’m your father…” “What does that mean?” I never lost touch with my inner four-year-old, in a sense. Like, I just got here. I was blown away.
Angelita lounged in her chair under an umbrella on the other side of the chicest pool. She was hot, red hot —as I liked to make fun of her and her unforgettable love of sex— in a red one-piece, cut-off jeans, and Adidas sandals. “The woman in love,” I called her, for the purposes of my undercover investigation. She was a major Barbara Streisand fan. Now that her husband had passed away, she worked at the club as a lifeguard — she was there, anyway, but once again, her family wasn’t the wealthiest one there. Not to assume, but I believe they were considered to be more of a special family, and I have no idea.
Taking my seat, in my mind, before her, the first revelation I had as an adult who did indeed reopen these years was that I had no idea who the hell these people were. Now, I sit here, literally, meaning I am alive, because I made a necessary switch. I am a mother in this chair, listening to this filth. I did not have a concerned parent, one who cared about what had just happened.
I knew that people could change their stories. I was Dr. J’s daughter, not Suzanne’s. I wanted to ensure that her story was burned into my flesh, the tennis court alongside us, with bodies on it that wanted to win. So I asked her the same questions over and over again. Over and over again. So, when I recall these conversations, these scenes cut internally in my mind to different locations along the terracotta deck, as we spoke about this scandal for four years. That’s when I officially closed it.
Two frosted tables were at either end of the pool: one by the jacuzzi and another closest to the tennis court. Between these two floating islands was a row of sun loungers, blindingly white in the sun. A ping-pong table sat in front of the workout room. That’s the basic set of my investigation, with the tennis court in the background. My mind just cuts, fast, fierce, as if I could hang onto the literal truth, memorize her every move. That was my intention. To study it, her, us, the human organism, specifically psychology. Till death do us part, type deal. After all, all she spoke about was love. Love, love. Love was the song on the stereo.
I began with the simplest question.
“Did I really live with you for four years?”
“Four years?”
“Was it, was it really four years?”
And already, since psychology was my interest, I was in a scenario that was so true, I would have the license to invent. I could appear in different locations asking her that question such as: my sneakers appearing under a bathroom stall next to hers. “Four years?”
It’s an interesting feature of the truth, in fact, where I would have the right to push it over a real edge in this case. Now, I don’t know about Dr. J, I don’t know how people negotiate this line, but it exists. I really did ask her this question so many times— now, I might not have appeared as lethal as the players on the court, but I gripped on real tight, too tight, to the racket.
Maybe I had a psychic feeling, I don’t know. I couldn’t really believe it myself.
“Did I really live with you for four years?”
At 11 o’clock at the courtside table, she flashed four fingers in my face. I also remember her being stationed at 1 o’clock at the same table and by the Jacuzzi. Now, am I supposed to factor in the possibility that my mind could play tricks on me, that it would be impossible to remember these details, for those who wouldn’t even consider that when they talk? Everything I did had a point to this degree of precision. I said, my mother reflected very very true things about the world, and it terrified me. I was studying all these lines, I called them, just trying to evaluate what my mother’s condition was.
Angelita stretched four magical and even jazzy fingers in my face, accompanied by a nice smile on her face. Luckily, she was so bombastic and memorable.
“Four.”
Beginning on her pinky, once again, a most hilarious woman, she told me to “pay attention.” She counted the years starting clearly here, tapping her pinky, as if discovering a new world in the process. “One, two, three,” she waved a little finger at me, to end on “four.” She kicked the chair, practically, this “bitch,” (my mother), and rested her Adidas sandals on the edge. Her tight fingers tapped her temple: “sick in the head.”
“Slut, pathetic, disgusting…” I never heard one kind adjective about the whorehouse, my mother, which she was.
“Four?”
Back to her pinky, she began listening “everything she did for me.”
“Clothed you, bathed you, fed you…”
(For 11k a month.)
How easy it was, to twist information, thinking about Dr. J. She AGREED to the deal. They made a deal. But she’s making it seem like she wasn’t paid to do just that, to put the mess of it aside a moment.
People do this—they shape the facts, and, a cop my witness, it can look “glittery” with “jazz hands” indeed. Nothing but routines. Why is she doing that? But people do, they twist the facts. 11k.
She made choices. These were her choices, not mine. She got wrapped up in a total nightmare shitshow, but she acted as if she did all this for peanuts — when 11k a month in value in 1989, in CASH, not taxed, is an attractive sum for someone who was supposedly protecting me from my father until my mother left him…. did her children cost her 11k a month in value, each?
“Can you describe what happened when you came over to my house?” I asked.