Madam Brussels In Hollywoodland

I once met a woman in Los Angeles whose name escapes me now. It is driving me nuts. I have googled and googled and asked ChatGpt, and scoured the old movie subreddits and when I tell you who I met, and the story she told me, it’s going to drive you nuts too. Then, you are going to google and google and talk to robots, the surest sign of a slide into instability and unhealthy preoccupation. Still, the story is worth a brief flirtation with obsession, no matter how doomed the search might seem.

My friend Lawrence said, “Hey, come with me. You need to meet Stacy’s Parents’ next-door neighbor.” This is an LA story and so, it is of course a story about who you know. That’s why this is a story about meeting my friend’s now ex-wife’s family’s neighbor.

It was the very late nineties, and I was thinking about moving to LA and Lawrence had said that I should tag along on his visit to his in-laws, who had a house up in the Hollywood Hills. I went and the three of us, me, Lawrence, and his wife, Stacy, had spent a few days driving around Southern California, going to West Coast specific chain restaurants, and threatening to go to a beach, or the sign, or the observatory, or the Getty, none of which we ever did. We did go to a party in a Hollywood bungalow that was thrown by the children’s swimming instructor to the stars. The next night we went to another party at the Standard Hotel pool, also thrown by the children’s swimming instructor to the stars. I can’t remember his name either and I think this is why I could never live in LA. It’s all about who you know, and I can’t remember anyone I’ve met.

I liked LA, though. I know, I’m a New Yorker now and I am supposed to have a shitty attitude about Los Angeles. And I do not think I could ever live there. But the thing about LA is you drive all the time. It doesn’t have neighborhoods the way New York teaches you to think about neighborhoods, as different aspects of one contiguous whole. LA is more like a collection of towns that have formed a loose and purposeful agreement, like the cowboys in the Magnificent Seven. They have come together to do a job, but they aren’t really a gang or a team. This is about the mission, it’s not personal.

And so you drive, floating in the liquid, languid drift that is a car in endless motion, from one of these towns to the next. In between these towns are the weird blanknesses, these non-places, and as you are making your way from an In n’ Out in Silver Lake to a small back yard gathering on the edge of Burbank, you look out the window at these limbo nowheres. Seeing these expanses of unnamed industrial streets and crisscrosses of wire and unexpected glimpses of the mostly dry, concrete bed of the Los Angeles river, you can’t help but think of the countess hopefuls who showed up in this place with ambition and determination, and then just disappeared. Is this where they went?

Certainly, they could just be living in a courtyard building like the one on Melrose Place, piecing together a living on extra work and walk on parts and shifts at a restaurant. Maybe someone got them a job on the production side, and they discovered that was close enough to the dream for them. They could have just found something totally non-showbiz to do in LA, there are other things that do in fact happen in that town, and many people have made happy lives and raised plenty of well-adjusted children while working in the exciting field of Hotel Management. That is also a thing that happens in LA. Or maybe they wandered off the path, out of one of these little towns that make up the big city and vanished into the seams of nothingness that pass by the car windows of people wheeling through the city of dreams, certain that they will never end up falling into one of the in-between places. Not every lost aspirant can be the Black Dahlia. She had something special, she had “It,” she was a star.

Speaking of stars.

So, we go next door to this person’s house, Stacy’s parents’ neighbor. As I said, we were in a post war neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills, so the neighborhood itself was a time capsule from that moment in the middle of the twentieth century when California, and all its promises, were the only thing an exhausted but hopeful Western World dreamt of. But if the neighborhood was a time capsule, then the house we entered was a time machine. You have to imagine a home that had been the cutting edge of interior design and home fashions in 1953, but you are coming into it in 1968. The once sharp corners of the mid-century modern furniture were a little rounded and scuffed by time. The wood that had been polished to a high shine had lost some luster and was now putting out a proud but flattened warmth. Throw pillows that had been a stormy blue in their day were now a little closer to gray, accents that had been central valley gold were now more of a yellow. But nothing was dirty, nothing was torn or ripped or broken, and nothing was not where it was intended to be.

The woman who let us in looked somewhat out of place. She looked like a mid-nineties librarian who wanted you to know she had once been something in the punk scene. Big statement jewelry, big statement glasses frames, a couple dozen different colors in her hair, but all of it over practical, work ready clothes that almost matched. I am pretty sure there was some leopard print tossed in to make the point, though. She was almost certainly a writer. But she was not who we were there to see, we were there to see her mother.

Again, it pains me that I cannot remember this woman’s name, and there is probably a place in Hollywood hell just for people who forget the names of people like this woman, but I do remember that she was Belgian, so we will call her Madam Brussels.

Madam Brussels was not out of place. In fact, when they talk about senior citizens spending their retirement years at home, and not in a long-term care facility, they call it “ageing in place.” Madam Brussels was the embodiment of ageing in place. She was a woman well into her seventies with perfectly swept and piled and sculpted platinum hair, who was sitting entirely upright at the edge of a scissor leg chair. It looked like she had grown old exactly there, with her hands in her lap and her pearls on. You would leave her there at night and wake up the next morning to discover she had on a completely different, perfectly tailored cocktail dressed from the one she’d been wearing the night before. But you’d swear she hadn’t moved. The only movement you felt likely to get from her, aside from a strategically calibrated head tilt that would speak louder than words and in whole paragraphs, would be a little pivot of her forearm as she offered her dainty hand to visiting supplicants. Today, I was among those supplicants. And it was an honor.

But why had I been brought for this audience?

In the Hitchcock classic To Catch A Thief, there is a scene in a casino. Cary Grant is trying get the attention of Grace Kelly and so, he leans over a roulette table and makes a show of accidentally dropping a poker chip down the decolletage of a very elegant woman sitting at that table. She does not flinch, she does not speak and when Cary Grant tries to ask for the chip back, she icily lifts a chip off her own pile and hands it to him without ever looking his direction. Madam Brussels was the elegant woman at the roulette table. She was who we were there to meet.

It didn’t take long for us to wade through the small talk and get to the good stuff, which was Madam Brussels telling stories of her life in Hollywood as a working actress. Once she got going, Madam Brussels was not stiff or aloof at all, she was witty and charming, generous and relaxed. She glossed past her early life - raised in Europe, but maybe not born there (?) though I was unclear on where she had been born - I think she thought that her formative years were not what we were there for, so she’d just skip to the good stuff. There was a lot of good stuff. But the best story she told, was how she got the part in To Catch a Thief.

“I used to know the back way onto all of the studio lots. So, when I needed work, I would just make my way onto one of the lots and wander around until I saw a line of women who looked like me. This would be a casting call.”

She had a light accent, just a little French lilt. I remember thinking that a Belgian accent is what it would sound like if French people weren’t mad at you for no reason all the time.

“So,” she went on,” one week I had the flu. It was terrible, I was so sick. But I was also quite broke, and the rent was coming due, so, no choice. Time to look for a job.

I went to all the studios, Warner Brothers, MGM, all of them. Sneezy and aching and exhausted the entire time. And, I was having no luck. Nothing. My last stop of the day and my last hope was Paramount. I got onto the lot, and I am wandering around and then I see it. A line of blonds. I got in line.

Well, we all file into this big room and there is Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock is personally casting the part. He starts walking down the line of girls, looking at each one, and all of them, when he gets to their place in line, they all throw their shoulders back and they thrust their breasts forward and they give him their biggest smile, like, ‘Pick me! Pick me!’ Then he gets to me. It’s not that I wouldn’t have done the same thing all of the other girls were doing, but I just couldn’t. I had been walking all over these huge studio lots, looking for work, I hadn’t eaten the whole day, and I had the flu. I felt terrible. So when he gets to me, instead of a big smile and pointing my bosom at him, I just looked at him like this.”

At this point, Madam Brussels turns to me and levels this gaze my direction. Her head was tilted forward, and her eyes were half lidded, she arched an eyebrow just enough to let me know she was put out by the effort. She was in her seventies and I have never felt more put in my place, more sexually intimidated, in my entire life. It was ice cold. Then she broke into a big grin, clapped her hands, and turned back to the room.

“Well! Mr. Hitchcock, he takes me in and then he turns back the way he’d come, and he says…” at this point, she did a not half bad Hitchcock for a tiny, Belgian woman, “’You stay. Everyone else can leave.’”

We all laughed. Everyone in the room was in love with her at this moment. It was the perfect Hollywood story. It was what you came to Los Angeles to hear. And chances are, I am making an utter hash of it. She told me the story nearly thirty years ago. By the time I left though, it was obvious that this woman was no museum piece. She was lively and engaged, still an actress, still getting work, still an active participant in the great big machine of dreams that is LA. In fact, I wonder if she had ever been that way, if she actually did have that air of aloofness and remove, or if that was just how my memory made sense of encountering someone of so much elegance, wit, and self-possession. I will never know.

I am writing this while LA is on fire. I do know plenty of people in Los Angeles and I hope that they are all safe. Likewise, I am sure Madam Brussels has passed on by now. But she will always be Hollywood for me. If they do not get these fires in check and all of LA is reduced to ashes, she will be the symbol in my head of all the history we will have lost. Safe journeys, Madam Brussels, and good luck, Los Angeles.