Finding Fame on a Wall

Summer in the city. I am standing in line at my local cleaners, staring at a photograph of actress Erin Gray. It hangs on the wall next to a shot of Bobby Womack. For five years now, once or twice a week, I have studied the Womack and the Gray while I waited with my shirts.

I can tell you the nuances of these photographs. They are black and white, like all publicity stills. Gray’s photo seems to have been taken in the early ‘80s. At the bottom of her shot she wrote, “Thanks for the. . . . “ and the rest is unintelligible.

Once, I asked another customer if she could make out the last words. I wanted to know why Erin Gray felt gratitude. But the other customer couldn’t, and we went back to our waiting.

There’s another photograph of Gray about two blocks away. This one’s on the wall of a one-hour developing service and it contains an inscription that is perfectly clear. It says, “Thanks for the beautiful blowups.”

The photo shop also has a Tom Selleck, a Teri Garr, and two Richard Dreyfusses. In fact, it has enough celebrity photos to cover three walls.

I live in Studio City, see, and these collections of celebrity photos are everywhere. The Bank of America branch has one. The muffler shop has one. And before it was torn down, the carwash had one.

There are so many here and all over Los Angeles that they have become nearly invisible. Yet some mysteries remain. Why, for example, were celebrity photos abandoned by the upper-crust restaurants only to be embraced by neighborhood shops and the mini-malls? Does this mean we are less star-struck than before, or more?

When I first came to Los Angeles, the original Brown Derby restaurant still remained. You could walk inside and see, in the smoky reaches, row after row of photographs hanging above the booths. Clark Gable and Carole Lombard sitting over their steaks. Robert Taylor wearing spats and playing a game that appeared to be croquet. This was a world of calm and optimism that could make you ache with longing.

I remember once gazing stupidly and too long at one photograph showing John Wayne and John Ford on a sailing yacht off the Baja coast. They were playing cards on the deck, drinking gin, and near the horizon you could see a Mexican town. Why this photograph ended up on the walls of the Brown Derby restaurant I could not guess, but it made my own life seem unspeakably dreary.

The new stuff is different. It’s my hunch that no one has ever ached with longing over the collection at the one-hour photo shop in Studio City. Jack Nicholson is there, surely, and with his new baby yet.

But who are these other people? Who is Yvette Nipar in her tank top?

Who is Sarge Pauline? Who is Clifton Wester and why is he telling us that he was the “academy nominee, C.A.S., 1983, Black Rain.”?

What, in any case, is the C.A.S.?

I don’t know, but it’s not as good as having a yacht parked off the Mexican coast. It’s not as good as feeding bites of your New York strip to Carole Lombard.

And maybe it doesn’t have to be. Because ultimately, our new photo collections offer something else altogether. These are images of people who, for the most part, are members of a Hollywood underclass, not its elite. These people have not arrived, they merely hope to. Someday.

Today you are looking at hungry ambition, not achieved glory.

And the merchants, I guess, understand that. They know that the dreams of this underclass have provided some of the social glue for Studio City since their earliest days. That’s what Studio City is all about. When you finally make it in Hollywood, you move to Bel-Air. But until then you hang out here, close to the studios, and you hope.

One day I walked into the local muffler shop and noticed its tiny collection of photos in the rear. There were three, I think. All covered in grime.

Who are these people? I asked the manager.

He wasn’t sure about two. But the third he knew.

That guy was the original Ronald McDonald, the manager said. One day he came in for a muffler and brought his photo with him.

He was a nice guy but the manager had never seen him again. And so the manager was thinking about taking the photo down.

After all, he said, you gotta give others a chance. A new Ronald McDonald might walk in any day.