Archive: Lana Clarkson

From issue 1 of The Stool Pigeon, January 2005

I have slept with two people who are now dead. One of them was a male model that died of a heroin overdose; the other was the actress who Phil Spector stands accused of murdering.

I was visiting my mother in Hawaii early last year when I found out. I had just come in from the beach when I heard on the television that an actress had been shot at his LA mansion. “Who was it, Mom?” I asked.

“Oh, just some B-movie queen,” she replied.

I walked into the room and saw a photo of Lana Clarkson, my ex-lover, on the TV screen. She was smiling a huge smile, her hair lightly blown by a fan. “Oh my God,” I said.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

We met on a sunny day in San Francisco when Dicky, my boss at the time, invited me out on his big red speedboat with his new girlfriend, a stupid, buck-toothed blonde stripper with the body of a 12-year-old boy. “Isn’t she beautiful?” he kept asking me. “I’m thinking of buying her boobs.”

Towards the end of the afternoon, we headed to Sam’s, a bay-side restaurant in Marin County. All the boats were tied together so that people could roam around and mingle. On one of them was a tall, voluptuous blonde woman in sparkly jeans, high-heeled sandals, and a bust-hugging sweater. She was trying to be a lot younger than she was, and that immediately attracted me to her. (When the married couple I was dating had taken me to the Swingers’ Convention in Reno, the abundance of trashy, middle-aged housewives with bad perms, fake nails, thong bikinis, and stripper heels, not to mention insatiable libidos, had made me develop a fetish for women who are past their prime.) “Who is that, Dicky?” I asked.

“I don’t know, darling,” he replied. “She must be a friend of Burt’s. He used to be a billionaire before the market crashed. He’s got plenty of friends who look like that.”

“I’m going to go seduce her. I’ll be back.”

“Okay, darling. Why don’t you give Burt a bottle of champagne from me.” (He had bought several cheap bottles earlier and put expensive price tags on. “Those assholes won’t know the difference,” he told me.)

I climbed over a series of 40-foot boats, at each one getting supplied with a new glass of champagne. Finally I made it to where the woman was talking to an old man with intense-looking eyes and saggy facial skin. They looked like they were fighting about something. “Hello, and welcome aboard,” said the old man, trying to make his scratchy voice sound friendly. “I’m Burt, the owner of this boat, and this is Lana Clarkson, an actress visiting us from LA. Would you like some champagne?”

“Actually, Dicky wanted me to bring you this bottle.”

“Tell him it’s much appreciated,” he chuckled. “Now let me get you a glass of the good stuff.”

At that moment, a woman on the bow of the boat slipped and fell on her ass. Burt rushed over to join the other men in helping her up, and I was left alone with Lana.

I looked deeply and totally sexily into her sunglasses as we chitchatted. She replied, “Oh, is that so?” to everything I said, meanwhile checking out who she could talk to that was more important than me. “So, Memphis, would you like me to get you some more champagne?” she asked, disappearing into the cabin of the boat without waiting for an answer.

A fat man with a bright red face and a lecherous smile sauntered over to me. “I’m Captain Ned. Would you like to hear a joke?”

“Not particularly.”

“Ooh! We got us a feisty one here!” he said, laughing with his mouth wide open. Then, sensing its emptiness, he shoved in some pâté and crackers. He brushed aside my hair with one of his podgy fingers and whispered, “I bet you are an animal in bed, gorgeous.”

“Speaking of gorgeous,” I said, “tell me about that actress.”

“I don’t know. She says she’s in her early thirties. I think she was on Miami Vice. And she’s got great tits!” he guffawed, his rancid whiskey and pâté breath nearly making me vomit.

I excused myself to go to the restroom and went into the cabin. Lana was sitting down talking to a man with pubic hair on his head. “I want to show you something, Lana,” I said as I stood right up in front of her and began to take off my clothes to reveal my white string bikini with rhinestones on the string parts. “What do you think of my new bikini?” I asked, and I began to give her a lap dance.

She raised one eyebrow, said, “Oooh, rhinestones,” and took a sip of champagne. Pubic hair was sitting there with his mouth wide open, but Lana maintained her composure. Nevertheless, I saw her lower lip tremble faintly as her perfectly manicured, slightly wrinkled hand lifted her glass to her mouth.

“I’ll see you later, then,” I said, picking up my clothes to leave the cabin. Neither of them said anything.

Later, as Captain Ned started the engine, Lana came up to me and said, “So how about you ditch Dicky and join us for caviar at Burt’s house? He’s got a pool and an excellent selection of Andrew Blake DVDs.”

As we rode under the Golden Gate Bridge, I discreetly put my hand on Lana’s thigh. She began to purr in my ear and said, “Are you my little kitten?”

I tried my best to purr back.

“Does little kitty like to rub pussy?”

I put my hand in her crotch.

We docked at the marina and got into Burt’s bullet-proof Mercedes, which he said used to belong to a KGB officer. The market we stopped at didn’t have beluga caviar, so Burt said we had to go somewhere else.

“Really, Burt,” Lana whined, “it doesn’t matter. Any kind of caviar is fine.”

“I DON’T EAT JUST ANY KIND OF CAVIAR,” he yelled with such anger that I thought he must be joking. Then I saw Lana wipe away a tear. She sulked for the rest of the ride. Ned told jokes. I was the only one who laughed.

As soon as we arrived at Burt’s house in Pacific Heights, Lana led me to the bedroom and took off her clothes. She rubbed her big voluptuousness all over me, rolled around the bed messing up the high thread-count sheets, and let her hair fall into tantalising formations in front of her face. Repeatedly, she said, “Oooh,” “Aaaah,” “Prrrrr,” and, “My publicist would just kill me if she found out.” Never once did she look me in the eye. I tried desperately to make her come but I couldn’t. At one point, she got up, put on a bathrobe and said, “Caviar, little kitty?”

When we came out, Ned was smiling like a young boy on Christmas morning. Burt was glaring at the wall and didn’t acknowledge us, which prompted Lana to put on her sulking face again and go sit on the other side of the room. “Why the hell do you have to be such a childish bitch?” he growled without looking at her.

Her face crumpled and she began to cry. “I’m not a bitch! Why do you say those things?”

They went into the other room, where he yelled and she whimpered for close to an hour. I had no idea what they were fighting about, but I was frightened by the intensity of it. When they came out, Lana’s face was smeared and blotchy. She looked perfect.

“So, Memphis,” Burt said to me seriously, “I’ve been thinking. You seem like a take-charge kind of woman. Someone with a head on her shoulders.” He shot a condescending look in Lana’s direction, and she started to whimper again. “I think you should work for me.” His piercing eyes were looking at me as if the deal were already done.

I was scared to say yes, and scared to say no. But I thought that maybe I could become Lana’s protector. “One of the apartments upstairs is unoccupied,” Burt continued. “You can move in next week.”

Thus I began as Burt’s ‘personal assistant’, driving his cars on errands around the city; mending his relationships with his girlfriends whenever they got in a fight; making sure the pool got swum in while he was out of town; going to New York for the Christmas party at The Plaza; buying pashminas with Wayne Newton’s ex-wife, a Korean woman with the smallest nose ever constructed; taking private skiing lessons in Aspen even though I have been skiing since I was six; watching Paris Hilton make a fucking asshole of herself on the dance floor of the Caribou Club; buying Burt’s daily bottle of Chopin vodka and then listening to him rant until late in the night about the shitty hand life had dealt him.

After that, when Lana came to San Francisco, she stayed in my apartment, and talked excitedly about her projects and her comeback, which was inevitable, she said. She was working on a bunch of skits where she impersonated celebrities like Little Richard. Never again would she be typecast as a barbarian queen. I sat at the kitchen table with her, running my hands through her brittle, bleached hair, and gave her all my support. She always had to go to bed early and wake up early to go to work, and when she did, she would leave a sweet note with a heart or a smiley face thanking me for everything.

After a few months, Burt had grown too dependent on me, and I was too scared to find out anything more about his life. When he was in Mexico with one of his girlfriends and I was supposed to be watching his house, I gathered up some of the hundred-dollar bills lying around and moved to Vietnam. I left him a note with a smiley face thanking him for everything.

I never talked to Lana again.

Phil Spector has pleaded not guilty to shooting Lana in the head. I suppose he’s going to claim that she was emotionally unstable and shot herself. Yes, Lana was emotionally unstable, but I really don’t think she would shoot herself. She was too full of hope and enthusiasm for her future. When she got emotional, it was to get other people’s sympathy, or because she loved to create drama, like any other actress.

Of course, the good thing about all of this is that now Lana has the fame she always wanted. But I preferred her the way she was when I was first dazzled by the light of her fading star.

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