My mother taught me to love Hollywood. She just never really believed I’d become part of it.
Parents and Dreams: Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor & Me
My mother taught me to love Hollywood. She just never really believed I’d become part of it.
My mother loved movie stars.
Movies. Television. Hollywood. Glamour.
We watched movies together, and she knew the histories of the actors, actresses and directors. We bought movie magazines. I cut out photographs of stars and taped them to the wall above my desk.
Hollywood was only about twenty-five minutes west of where I grew up in Glendora, California.
But to my mother, it might as well have been another planet.
Not to me.
I looked at those people and thought:
Why couldn’t that be my world too?
Turns out, sometimes it was.
“You Can Do Anything—But Don’t Reach for the Stars”
My mother gave me tremendous self-esteem.
She told me I was special.
She told me I could do anything I put my mind to.
But Mom’s pep talks usually came with a peculiar little disclaimer.
I’m paraphrasing the philosophy, but it was essentially:
You can do anything you put your mind to. But don’t reach for the stars, because you probably won’t get there.
Thanks, Mom.
Aim high.
Just not that high.
I understand her better now.
My mother wasn’t trying to crush my dreams.
She was trying to protect me from disappointment.
There were things she couldn’t imagine happening in her own life, so it was difficult for her to imagine them happening in mine.
I had the opposite problem.
I could imagine practically anything.
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At Sixteen, I Found My Way Into Hollywood
There were a few minor obstacles.
For example, I was sixteen.
And the Hollywood nightlife I wanted to experience required one to be twenty-one.
I solved that problem.
Illegally.
Let’s leave the technical details of my youthful entrepreneurial activities in the memoir.
The important part is that teenage Jon-David found himself sneaking out of his parents’ house in Glendora in the middle of the night, driving into West Hollywood and getting into Studio One, one of the legendary gay nightclubs of the era.
I had fantasized about New York’s Studio 54.
Studio One became my California version.
There were beautiful people.
Movie stars.
Television stars.
Music.
Lights.
Celebrities.
And dancing.
Dear God, I loved dancing.
I walked into that club and didn’t feel as though I’d entered someplace I didn’t belong.
I felt like I’d finally arrived somewhere I’d been expecting to find.
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And Then I Met the Village People
I was still sixteen when I met some of the Village People at Studio One.
Yes.
Those Village People.
And here’s the part of the story that has always mattered more to me than simply being able to say I knew them:
They looked out for me.
They knew I was too young to be there.
Felipe Rose—the Indian—and Randy Jones—the Cowboy—made sure the people around me knew it too.
They discouraged me from drinking and drugs.
They taught me how to avoid men who made me uncomfortable on the dance floor.
Felipe even nicknamed me “The Squirrel” because I flitted around the dance floor, minding my own business and, as he put it, hiding my nuts.
It stuck.
Decades later, when I ran into Felipe and Randy again at different times, they remembered me.
Not necessarily as Jon-David.
As The Squirrel.
I’ll take it.
There are young men I remember from that period who didn’t survive their youth.
Some became lost in drugs.
Some became lost in the nightlife.
And then AIDS arrived.
So when I look back at those famous men who kept an eye on a sixteen-year-old kid dancing where he had absolutely no business being, the story doesn’t feel glamorous to me.
It feels lucky.
Then There Was Rock Hudson
Years later, my life had moved much closer to the world I’d stared at in those movie magazines.
My boyfriend worked at a gay bar called the Silver Fox.
And one of the people who sometimes sat at our table was Rock Hudson.
Yes.
That Rock Hudson.
We became friendly.
We also spent time around two men Rock was involved with at the time. Oddly enough, I remember them having the same first name, although all these years later I don’t trust myself enough to tell you what that name was.
But I remember Rock.
And I particularly remember one night.
Rock came to the table and announced:
“I want to be on Dynasty.”
I remember looking at him.
He was a little bristly at that point in his life, and privately I thought:
Yeah. I don’t think you’re going to be on Dynasty.
Shows what I knew.
The next thing I knew, Rock Hudson was on Dynasty.
Then he kissed Linda Evans.
And shortly thereafter, the private epidemic that gay men had already been living through collided spectacularly with mainstream America.
Rock Hudson had AIDS.
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Suddenly, AIDS Had the Face of a Movie Star
It’s difficult to explain to people who didn’t live through that period what AIDS felt like.
Fear.
Rumors.
Ignorance.
Shame.
People were dying.
And enormous numbers of Americans still thought AIDS belonged to somebody else.
Then Rock Hudson became ill.
One of Hollywood’s great leading men had AIDS.
The disease suddenly had a face millions of Americans recognized.
And when Rock died, Elizabeth Taylor rose to the occasion.
She became one of the most visible and powerful celebrity voices in the fight against AIDS.
Which is where, rather improbably, I came back into the story.
“Liz Taylor Wants You to Help”
One day my phone rang.
The man on the other end identified himself as José Eber, Elizabeth Taylor’s famous hairdresser.
I knew that voice.
And I’d been around enough famous people by then that somebody famous calling me didn’t seem impossible.
Then came the sentence:
Liz Taylor wants you to help her.
The project involved AIDS Project Los Angeles and a cut-a-thon effort connecting major California cities, including Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Diego and San Francisco.
I became involved.
I produced a promotional video that went into bars to tell people about the upcoming AIDS fundraising effort.
And suddenly I was working around Elizabeth Taylor and José Eber on an AIDS project.
José and I continued hanging out for quite a while afterward.
He was fun.
He was kind.
And all these years later, I still remember him that way.
But look at the strange chain of events.
A kid from Glendora loves movie stars because his mother loves movie stars.
That kid secretly enters Hollywood nightlife.
He grows up.
He knows Rock Hudson.
Rock dies of AIDS.
Elizabeth Taylor becomes an extraordinary AIDS activist.
A connection from Rock’s world remembers me and where to find me.
José Eber calls.
And suddenly I’m helping Elizabeth Taylor fight the epidemic that was devastating my community.
Life doesn’t always travel in straight lines.
Sometimes it circles back.
The Woman I Wanted to Tell Was My Mother
Here’s the strange part.
My mother would have loved these stories.
At least, I thought she would.
This was the woman who taught me about movie stars.
This was the woman who loved Hollywood.
I eventually told her about meeting celebrities.
The Village People.
Lee Majors.
Kristy McNichol.
Rock Hudson.
Elizabeth Taylor.
People whose photographs might once have appeared in the magazines we looked through together.
And Mom was…not particularly impressed.
That hurt me.
I wanted a “Wow!”
I wanted:
You met WHO?
Maybe even:
My son knows Elizabeth Taylor!
I didn’t need a parade.
Okay, maybe a small parade.
But I wanted my mother to recognize that somehow her son had gotten close to that world we’d watched together from the couch.
Instead, what she often heard in my stories was something else.
She heard about the teenager who had lied to her.
The son who had sneaked out.
The double life.
The things she hadn’t known.
While I was telling her:
“Look where I got to go!”
Maybe she was hearing:
“Look at everything you didn’t know about your own son.”
I understand that now.
I didn’t then.
But Once, I Got to Give Her a Star
There was one wonderful exception.
Around 1984, when I owned a hair salon, I took my mother to see La Cage aux Folles at the Long Beach Civic Light Opera.
And that evening, Leslie Uggams was there.
Mom saw her.
Her eyes got huge.
I knew exactly what I had to do.
Through connections at the theater, I was able to walk my mother over and introduce her.
Leslie Uggams was delightful to Mom.
And my mother lit up.
She didn’t gush afterward.
That wasn’t really her style.
But I knew.
For one moment, my mother got to touch the world she’d watched from afar.
Literally.
She got to shake a star’s hand.
And her son was the one who made the introduction.
I think Mom thought I was pretty cool that night.
Maybe We Inherit Dreams Our Parents Were Afraid to Have
Writing How I Killed My Mother has made me wonder whether children sometimes inherit more than their parents’ personalities.
Maybe we inherit their unlived dreams too.
Mom loved Hollywood.
I chased it.
Mom admired stars.
I assumed I could meet them.
Mom feared disappointment.
I often behaved as though disappointment was merely an inconvenient delay.
And I did meet some of those people.
I worked with some of them.
I did their hair.
I sat at their tables.
I danced beside them.
I watched some of them become part of history.
But here’s the irony.
None of that ever made me a movie star.
It didn’t make me rich.
It didn’t make me famous.
It didn’t create the giant Hollywood career teenage Jon-David imagined.
What it gave me was something I value much more today.
Stories.
Extraordinary, ridiculous, funny, sad, historically fascinating stories.
And now I finally get to tell them.
Maybe Mom Was Wrong About Reaching for the Stars
Or maybe she was half right.
You can reach for the stars and fail.
I certainly did.
More than once.
But occasionally something else happens.
You reach.
You don’t become the star.
You simply get close enough to discover that stars are people.
They sit at bar tables.
They have boyfriends.
They announce they’re going to be on television shows you secretly doubt they’ll ever get cast on.
They get sick.
They lose friends.
They step forward when other people are frightened.
They help.
They disappoint.
They make history.
And sometimes they shake your mother’s hand.
Maybe that’s enough.
Because my mother told me not to reach too far for the stars.
I did it anyway.
And every once in a while…
I touched one.
— Jon-David
More From How I Killed My Mother
These stories—and the secrets behind them—are part of How I Killed My Mother, my memoir podcast about family, forgiveness, identity, grief, spirituality and the strange ways our relationships continue shaping us throughout our lives.
Listen to the podcast and join my mailing list at HowIKilledMyMother.com for new stories, bonus material and updates about the upcoming memoir.
And if your parents ever warned you not to dream too big, maybe it’s worth asking:
Were they protecting you from failure—or protecting you from a dream they were afraid to have themselves?
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