The Boy From Beverly Hills

Behind the gates of those gilded estates in Beverly Hills lie motives and motifs found in every neighborhood—greed and charity, fear and courage, loyalty and betrayal, the most magical things and the most mundane. Mom and Dad moved into that famous little town fifty years ago but could never buy a lot there today. Not even a tiny one. Their 1912 Monterey Colonial is the oldest house on the block. Grainy photos of the Beverly Hills Hotel under construction show our home in the foreground, all by its lonesome in what was then a bean field. It belonged to the hotel’s first owner, and the Moscatels purchased it in the seventies from the actress who played Morticia on The Addams Family. The only thing that woman left on the property was the Peacock chair she memorably sat in on the television show. Mom never met the lady or watched her program but kept that chair around because she thought it nicely matched our patio’s lattice. I saw it as a brittle piece of wicker furniture gathering dust, not understanding its portentous significance for years.

That fateful evening, Remember Me, an episode, of all things, about adoption, was screened at Paramount Studios. The Moscatels were usually invited to those events, but the Landons couldn’t find a space for Albert that night. It’s how Eleanor recalled it, at least, which didn’t make sense to her because Michael was the showrunner. So when she spotted Lynn’s coiffeur sitting in the audience, Mom nearly lost it. How could they deny my son and seat that man in his place? she asked herself. It was one of many questions that would go unanswered in the sorrowful days that followed my brother’s death. It’s the nature of tragedy. The emotional upheaval of loss blurs a survivor’s memory. And their grief, from denial to bouts of anger, guilt, bargaining, and ultimately acceptance, often ends with a little piece of them dying too.

Behind the gates of those gilded estates in Beverly Hills lie motives and motifs found in every neighborhood—greed and charity, fear and courage, loyalty and betrayal, the most magical things and the most mundane. Mom and Dad moved into that famous little town fifty years ago but could never buy a lot there today. Not even a tiny one. Their 1912 Monterey Colonial is the oldest house on the block. Grainy photos of the Beverly Hills Hotel under construction show our home in the foreground, all by its lonesome in what was then a bean field. It belonged to the hotel’s first owner, and the Moscatels purchased it in the seventies from the actress who played Morticia on The Addams Family. The only thing that woman left on the property was the Peacock chair she memorably sat in on the television show. Mom never met the lady or watched her program but kept that chair around because she thought it nicely matched our patio’s lattice. I saw it as a brittle piece of wicker furniture gathering dust, not understanding its portentous significance for years...

That hideous beast. It murdered my best friend one New Year’s Eve, leaving his bruised, punctured corpse to rot all week on the floor of a Malibu drug den. He died steps from the same sandy beach where, as blood brothers with matching bowl cuts and our third-grade imaginations, we’d once frolicked morning to night, burying treasures at the foot of a rocky cove. The aroma of embers crackling in a nearby bonfire signaled it was time for supper. Now I’m haunted by a different scent. A stench, really. One that lingered like a fume well after Scotty’s interment. It was a day of reckoning, an unearthly event that, ever since, has served as a line of demarcation between the rebellious child I was and the man I’d have to become. To hear more, subscribe to this podcast or get the whole audio of The Bastard of Beverly Hills on Audible [https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Bastard-of-Beverly-Hills-Audiobook/B0C3DHX6Q2].

I grew up thinking the old days were like silent movies, shot in black and white and mostly forgotten. Picturing them through a bleak, monochrome lens helped me brush aside my past much the same way, witlessly discarding any faded scenes that, in color, may have revealed more than I wanted. Then well into adulthood, a voice behind me yelled, “Cut!” I turned back and discovered I’d been adopted. Lied to my whole life. In an instant, all I’d come to know of myself seemed to vanish. No past, present, or future remained to which I belonged. A fuse had blown, and the universe became a darkroom. When I awoke, my yesterdays in Los Angeles slowly resurfaced, like a dusty film reel dropped from a staircase, unspooling down each step—its tiny, perforated frames emblazoned with famous faces in whose company the truth was concealed. I endeavored to develop the negatives, hoping a reliable image might arise from the emulsion. But how do you arrange a carousel of grey, disjointed memories hidden for over thirty years? That answer materialized one evening in the advice of an angelic widow I’d once worked beside in a bookshop. With so many chapters of her life spent perusing the shelves, she’d become a hunchback, her spine nearly broken. Upon hearing my dilemma, she gently took my hand as if to read it. “I know of only seven stories in this world,” she said, tracing a line in my palm. “Just seven stories even the most ambitious writer could hope to reconstrue—a tragedy, a comedy, the journey, a quest, the rags-to-riches fable, a rebirth, and the tale of a monster.” Then, staring into my hungry eyes, she leaned in and whispered, “Which one is yours?” Suddenly, I knew.