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didn’t own a car until I was a teenager. When we first moved to L.A., their credit rating was so nonexistent they couldn’t even get a charge account at a department store. They had a friend use his card to buy us a TV and paid him back in cash installments.
    Once we moved to L.A., the places we found to live were all deluxe, mind you. After the Chateau, we bounced around the Hollywood Hills and West Hollywood, but my father would not venture so much as “east of Fairfax” (let alone “east of La Brea”— quelle horreur !). We were the snobbiest bunch of broke people you ever met.
    Still, my parents always wanted to be able to say their children lived in a real house, and they finally got their chance. At one point, when our income was particularly high, we moved out of the Chateau to a house literally across the street. Even though it was huge and had a yard full of trees, all my brother and I did was complain that it wasn’t the Chateau. He even got up every morning and walked across the street to use their pool (again, this was the ’60s, and he was an actor, so nobody stopped him). I pressed my nose against the window and sighed, “I used to live in a castle!” My parents missed the laundry service. After a few months of this nonsense, my father asked why in hell we were paying more rent just to carry on like this all day, and we packed up and happily moved back to the Chateau.
    Sadly, we couldn’t stay there forever. We moved into the heart of West Hollywood, to Waring Avenue just off La Cienega Boulevard. It was another attempt at a “real house.” It was adorable, with a yard, hardwood floors, a big kitchen, and a breakfast nook. Unfortunately, it only had two bedrooms. My parents put me in one, my brother in the other, and they slept on the pullout sofa in the living room. It’s possible they could have afforded a house with more bedrooms, but it would have meant moving to a slightly cheaper neighborhood. And that was never going to happen. My father would have slept in the bathtub first. For him, it was “location, location, location.” He would rather have an eight-by-eight room in a luxury building than a five-room ranch house in the type of neighborhood he always referred to as a (sharp intake of breath) “bad address.”
    I liked Waring Avenue. I had a good-sized room, and I loved that breakfast nook. There were lots of children in the neighborhood and things to do within walking distance, and I was given pretty much free rein to go where I wished. And back then we had Beverly Park. At La Cienega and Beverly, where the Beverly Center shopping mall sits now, was an amusement park, with roller coasters, a haunted house, the whole bit. Oh, and a fully functioning, active oil well. Well, the whole area was rich in oil, and you couldn’t very well expect them to cap it off because there was an amusement park full of children on the premises, could you? Environmental hazards were not as well understood by the general public then as they are now, so we all thought it was just great to ride the Ferris wheel and watch the pump go up and down, up and down, happily churning up oil and carcinogens all day.
    So Dad’s hanging out with Liberace and trying to “pass,” Mom’s managed to successfully escape from traditional women’s work by becoming a cartoon, my brother is a successful (if somewhat miserable) brooding teen idol, and I’m a cute blond six-year-old. What could possibly go wrong?
    Just about everything.
    My parents went out quite a lot, so I was often left home with a baby-sitter. That should have been fine, except that my parents had some strange ideas about who was considered a reasonable choice as a baby-sitter. I encountered a long parade of actors, friends, acquaintances, and friends of friends. Some of them were amusingly eccentric, some had severe drug and alcohol issues, and some were actually certifiably insane. (I once took a count and realized that three out of four people who