Sunday, July 19, 1992
Los Angeles Times, Home Edition
Section: Book Review
Page: 11
The Love Life of an Abalone; RICH KIDS By Robert
Westbrook , (Birch Lane Press: $18.95; 320 pp.)
By: Mark Lindquist
Mark Lindquist is the author of "Sad Movies" and
"Carnival
Desires."
You will probably not be shocked to learn that the children of rich
movie-industry parents are likely to grow up spoiled, unhappy and
mentally unhealthy. Robert Westbrook brings personal experience to the
subject, however, as the son of Hollywood gossip columnist Sheila Graham.
His self-written bio sheet claims he couldn't publish this book while his
mother was alive. Best known as the mistress of F. Scott Fitzgerald, she
presumably had standards in fiction. "Rich Kids" would have horrified
her.
Jonno Singer, the narrator, is the son of Alexander Singer, a literary
agent who becomes a studio president, a man attracted to women on the
basis of what Westbrook knowingly describes as "Hollywood Love . . . the
kind of love which mysteriously evaporates the moment the circumstances
of mutual self-advantage disappear."
The elder Singer's first wife commits suicide after her career and
husband fail her. His second wife is Corina Norman, "a fabulously sexpot
actress," and Jonno's mother.
When Corina's career cools off, as "it" girl careers inevitably do,
she becomes a self-pitying drunk. This is no great loss to Jonno, because
you can't lose what you don't have. "She was hardly a mother at all
except for a few minutes here and there in various photo opportunities,
where she smiled into the camera with Rags and Carl on either side of
her, and me--the baby--generally in her lap. The moment the photographer
was finished, she'd brush us off like flies and return us to the care of
our butler, Albert. . . . Our crime was being born and ruining her
beautiful figure."
When Corina's career goes from cool to cold outright failure, Jonno's
father, true to Hollywood Love, finds another wife. Enter French star
Michelle Cordell, "sluttish and slovenly," usually stoned on hashish. She
gives Jonno such maternal advice as "You must not smoke marijuana and
drink alcohol at the same time. It will make you impotent when you try to
make love to the girls!" Jonno and his two brothers, Rags and Carl, are
joined by Michelle's children, David, and Zoe, the half-sister Jonno
describes with every erotic adjective he can muster.
"Rich Kids" has something like a plot--Jonno's father is murdered with his own Oscar and the question is which family member did it, but this is forgotten for many chapters while the narrator details his family life:
His oldest brother Rags is dying of AIDS. Rags, verbally abused by
Corina, spends several years totaling cars for sport and having sex with
the beloved butler Albert. Carl, second oldest, badly burned in a fire
started by Corina when drunk, is a semi-socialist who runs a shelter for
the homeless. Arguably the worst off and least interesting (until she
murders someone) is little sister Opera, a 15-year-old TV star about to
make the first "environmentally conscious teen movie." Half-brother
David, who learns young Republicanism from the Los Angeles Harvard School and S&M from
Gretchen the maid, grows up to run dad's movie studio. Most important to Jonno is Zoe, of
whom he can't stop himself from saying things like, "If I felt I could get away
with it, I'd let my tongue come
out and rest against her inner thigh. I used to imagine I was an abalone
clinging to a bare girl leg."
If this sounds incestuous, it is. Much in "Rich Kids" seems wrong, particularly the way in which Westbrook exposes and trashes the warped values of Hollywood while at the same time trying to move the reader with the narrator's oft-stated lust and star-crossed "love" for his half-sister Zoe.
This incest is a direct byproduct of the very world the narrator and author despise. (Zoe's father began molesting her when she was 5 and continued into her teen years.) While Westbrook occasionally hits chords that ring with awful truth, he has the Hollywood habit of shirking truth's consequences.
"Rich Kids" ends with Jonno married to Zoe, flying back and forth between Los Angeles, where he has taken control of his dad's movie studio, and Peru, where Zoe feeds llamas. Jonno lives with her as though she's his wife, and we're to believe their life is a happy one.
The book is also cheapened by sentences out of "The Perils of Pauline" that end almost every chapter: "The limousine took off in a ride I will never forget"; careless editing--tenses are forgotten and "you're" is used as a possessive; the dozen or so times you're told it's not easy being a rich kid; constant explaining that undercuts the natural strength of the action.
Yet somehow "Rich Kids" is disturbingly compelling. This, I suspect, is thanks to the powerful allure the perversions and ruins of Hollywood still possess, something Westbrook understands, has seemingly suffered from, and here exploits.
