Except for Rome, I thought Europe was nowhere compared with LA-everywhere I went, everyone I met was in awe of California and dying to go to Hollywood. In Rome, where I lived alone for six months after Paris, I never once set foot inside the Sistine Chapel, but at least in Italy I learned some Italian, and as for art, you could watch it while you ate tartufo outside, and large nudes were everywhere, abundantly, galore. My sister, who did learn French, had to drag me to museums since going inside a building to see art never would have occurred to me. The year before, I had lived in France, supposedly to learn French at the Alliance Française, but all I did was hang out at La Coupole picking up Americans. When Julian came to pick me up, I was wearing clothes of nunlike severity so nobody would have the slightest reason to believe I’d take them off: a gray pleated skirt down to my shins and an Ivy League blouse. (His greatest photograph was the one of Madame Nhu and her daughter when they heard her husband had been shot, and they stood weeping in each other’s arms-surrounded by news photographers, a sea of flashbulbs-which appeared in a two-page spread in Life.) Maybe this was just Julian trying to get the clothes off one more girl-which he was famous for doing, living across the street from Beverly Hills High School as he did and always making lascivious cracks.īut with Marcel there, I figured he’d cool it, and I knew enough about him to realize that when Julian took pictures, he took pictures. The next day Julian called to make sure I didn’t chicken out, which seemed a sensible idea after I woke up and realized that I had never taken my clothes off in public-and certainly not in a museum at 9 am to play chess for a photograph. (After I saw the contact sheets, I never took the Pill again.) And obviously I’d disappointed Walter so much he forgot all about me. When he came to pick up my sister, Julian noticed that I was to be left behind and he invited me, but I felt so banished in spirit and it didn’t seem to me the sort of thing you could crash. Even my sister, who was only 17 (I was 20), was going, with this bold photographer, Julian Wasser, a Time photographer who drove around with a police radio in his car. This was the wrong time, of course, for me to have pulled this move, because in a month the Duchamp show would be happening and the beautiful old Green Hotel would be filled with everyone in the LA art world, champagne, bands, clothes! But Walter never called me back, and I wasn’t invited. Suddenly I felt things had gotten too weird, even for Walter, and for the first time in my life, I realized I had a great reason to hang up on someone-like women do in the movies-a thing I’d never imagined myself doing until just then. “Well, sort of like Toulouse-Lautrec,” he said.