Hollywood Hotels

Also: RIP Nora Forster, Mrs. Rotten

I was sorry to hear of the death of Nora Forster, the longtime wife of John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. Back in 1979, if you were offered long odds that their marriage would be a lasting one, you might have felt a fool to take it. But it would have paid off big: They were married for 44 years. For the last number of years, Lydon has taken care of her, suffering from Alzheimer's, from which she finally died April 6, age 80. They were the great loves of each other's lives.

I had dinner with John and Nora one chilly Sunday night in New York's Little Italy, probably 40 years ago. My LA drinking buddy Rosso came to New York doing press for John, but I don't think I was on duty that night. I tried to convince them there were better Italian restaurants in midtown Manhattan, but Nora insisted on Little Italy. On a wintry Sunday night, we found one restaurant open. They couldn't have been more accommodating, as there were few customers, and Lydon and Forster, at least, looked like celebrities. She spoke English with a German accent. We ordered cocktails, and Nora ordered a screwdriver.

No problem for the bar, they had orange juice. Not good enough for Nora. She wanted her screwdriver with fresh squeezed orange juice, and only fresh squeezed orange juice. A waiter or bus boy was sent out into the night to find any place open that might have oranges. No luck. This part of downtown was still a dead zone. Chinatown had swallowed up a few blocks of Little Italy, but it was still a fortress of Scorsese's Mean Streets, meaning, there were still a few wiseguys who had not yet moved off Mulberry Street out to the suburbs. If any of them were dining out, they were at that restaurant. They might not have recognized Johnny Rotten as a celebrity, just a troublemaker with a screwy haircut, and a German wife with a disrespectful attitude, you know what I'm saying? Johnny tried to talk Nora down. Rosso tried to talk Nora down. I tried to talk Nora down, like, listen lady: They tried their best, went out of their way to try to satisfy your demands, and if you don't accept your screwdriver, then order something else, drink the bottle of wine already on the table. Because otherwise, the only way we're walking out of here is dead. Eventually, she calmed down. The veal was excellent, the hangover not so pleasant. Rosso put dinner on his credit card, but we threw a whole extra bunch of $20 bills on the table, perhaps an extra $100 tip, out of gratitude and respect.

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Courtesy and copyright, Hilton Hotels

If I wasn't renting a car right away, Rosso was the guy who would generally pick me up when I got to LAX on my regular trips to Los Angeles in the early 1980s. (I only knew him as Rosso; I could never remember his first name.) His smartest PR plot was to line up the transportation concession as a client for the 1983 US Festival. Which meant, really, a fleet of Winnebagos backstage, for bands, and VIPs, including one for himself. You want to meet an attractive, shapely blonde California girl in the desert outside San Bernardino? Start to chat, and then say, as the sun is beating down, say 3 o'clock: "How would you like a shower, some air conditioning, and a cold drink right now?" We went to Rosso's trailer, where she was so delighted with her shower that she flashed me. We spent the rest of the weekend together.

We had another date in Los Angeles, at Le Dome, which was the music biz commissary back in the day. Nobody told her the secret, that Le Dome was the hot spot for lunch; dinner reservations were easy to come by. The food was better than it had to be, and this young lady from the San Gabriel Valley, which at the time was like the San Fernando Valley on Mars, was impressed. We slept over at her place, since she had to work the next morning.

I can't say we were knocked out by each other. If I was then New York exotic neurotic, she was like "Annie Hall" without a sense of humor. The next time in town, I took her to see Bette Midler at the Greek Theater. She showed up late at my hotel, and we were late for the show. (I was interviewing Midler at her home that week.) Stupidly, I did not opt for valet parking. Instead, I made my usual exit-before-the-final-encore, hoping to get a jump on the traffic and back to my hotel. But not having valet parking meant anarchy on the nearby hills and lawns, and my car was blocked in by about 16 other cars, so it took us more than an hour after the show to get out of there. As I was having a claustrophobia freak out, I thought the girl was looking at my head, trying to spot the Jew horns.

I was staying at the Beverly Hilton, as I often did in those days, since it had the faded Hollywood glamour that my Newsday colleague Jerry Parker, who died much too young of AIDS, could not get enough of. I liked it a lot too. The girl and I went up to my room, kissed once, and then she decided she was going home. Just like that. I should have known it was over, but we did make a date for that Saturday night. When I called her Saturday, there was no answer. Or just her answering machine. I was having some obsessive issues, so I called her . . . a lot. I was never great at math, and never learned to count to the number of times I must have called her. Totally ghosted. I never saw her again.

Rosso came over and picked me up, and we had nowhere to go, either. We drove aimlessly up the boulevards. Wilshire? Whittier? And couldn't find a damn place to go. I wanted to find one of those piano lounges like Billy Joel sang about in "Piano Man," but we were on the wrong side of the Valley, any valley, for that.

I would have bet we could have stayed at the Beverly Hilton, drank martinis, and probably heard a piano player in the lounge right there. But I was an in-my-room drinker in those days. Even now, I wonder why I never had even a drink at the Beverly Hilton bar. I suspect it may have been the days of a prominently posted dress code there: Gentleman required to wear jacket and tie. Nowadays, even Cary Grant might forget to wear his jacket and tie to such a lounge.

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I don't know why I stopped staying at the Beverly Hilton. There were a bunch of hotels on the Strip with more rock & roll juice. I stayed once at the Continental Hyatt House, where I also dumbly gave my room number to some teenage girls who were on one of those "Teen Trips" around the country. They called my room at 1 AM, said they were on acid, did I want them to come over and party? No. I also watched some playoff football games at the bar of the Hyatt House on an exceptionally rainy day January day. The games started early Pacific time, and so too did the Bloody Marys. I tried the Mondrian, where I had once brought Keith Richards a bottle of Rebel Yell bourbon. Our sipping was perfunctory: Our interview was around noon, and we had a long day ahead (there was a big party that night to celebrate the release of one of his Ex-Pensive Winos albums). At the party, I found a kindly denizen of the scene to point out the entering VIPs: guys from Ratt, Slash, Warrant, whatever). I knew not to go to the after party, where I couldn't possibly keep pace.

I think I had originally registered at the Westwood Marquis, near UCLA, but driving there down Sunset felt like the other end of the Earth. I moved to the Sunset Marquis, where I could walk to the action: It was just a few miles to Westwood, but I prudently understood that I did not want to meet a member of the LAPD or any other law enforcement while I was behind the wheel of any vehicle in those days. I was at the bar of the Sunset Marquis trying to strictly limit my number of drinks (successfully, for once) because I had an early flight the next morning. There were two women sitting near me. The wing girl drew an excellent likeness of me on a cocktail napkin. The Alpha Girl, a shapely and slightly gorgeous groupie, kept going to the house phone to beg John Barbata, the drummer for the Starship, to let her come to his room. John was busy; the groupie was in tears; I went to bed, happy to sleep alone.