Sometime in the early 2000s, a famous photographer commissioned me to write a screenplay, ostensibly for him to eventually direct. He had been making bundles of Yankee dollars directing shampoo commercials, and felt it was his time to stretch out and be creative.
The screenplay, according to the photographer (I’ll call him Halston), was supposed to be an homage to Sunset Boulevard, only gay. Instead of Gloria Swanson, he imagined a glamorous older gentleman and former rock star — an infirm David Bowie type, if you will. The young guy was supposed to be a straight, wannabe rock star who sort of makes a deal with the devil by having a gay affair with the older guy, whom he idolized as a musician, in order to ingratiate himself to his industry connections. The operative title for the screenplay (my idea) was “Leper Messiah.”
Because Halston wanted the dilapidated Hollywood mansion the older gay man lives in to be a “character” in the screenplay, he flew me out to LA so I could get a visual sense of what he was talking about.
Halston was the most OCD-driven, micro-managerial person I have ever been around, personally — it was obviously a key to his success, nitpicking and being up everyone’s ass with a microscope all the time. He lived with his submissive boyfriend in the Hollywood hills in one of the famous Richard Neutra houses — a large, modernist, open-plan show-stopper that seemed to have been made out of glass cubes; as neatly appointed as only two highly aesthetically-minded gay men can usually pull off in a living environment.
To illustrate what he wanted the Bowie-character’s mansion to look like, he took me to a mansion owned by Rick Rubin, also in the Hollywood hills.
I’d never seen what someone with exactly my taste would do with unlimited finances, before or since. It was like being hit in the face with a wet swan.
Rubin’s house was one of those classic, pink, mission-style LA stucco homes built in the 1920’s, with moorish tiles and details. When you walked in the door, you were immediately standing in a large, high-ceilinged living room with an immense 8-foot golden Buddha radiating at the back - a gift, Rubin told me, from Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Sitting in front of it was a Le Corbusier leather day-bed, which doubled as a dog toy — the leather was shredded, with half of the stuffing spilling out of it, which somehow made it look even cooler — especially sitting as it was on top of the enormous, utterly thrashed Persian rug from some previous century which spread all over the room, which had huge chunks chewed out of it and was worn down to the weft strings in some places. I am obsessed with the look of very old, expensive and damaged things. As the French say, “A woman is never so beautiful as when she is touched by decay.”
To the right was a kind of what used to be a sun room — Rubin had found a church in Europe somewhere that was being demolished and had looted it for all of its stained glass windows — on all three sides, the room was illuminated by the Stations of the Cross. Inside, it looked like he had also cleaned out another crumbling church of all of its old dark wood library benches and shelves. It was a room of deep contemplation. I began to get a sense of Rubin’s eclectic spirituality, which was present in every room, in some way — he was especially fond of highly articulated, dizzyingly detailed Kabbalistic Trees of Life, which looked like they were expertly painted by monks with brushes the size of a single hair.
I felt a spasm of joy in a little spare bedroom he had down the hall — it was a tiny room, and in it was an enormous canopy bed made of gold-plated brass, the metalwork of which curved upward at the posts to support a gigantic golden crown in the center. This was set off by an old red silk-velvet bedspread which looked like it came from some glamorous vampire movie from the 1930’s. I wanted to move in there and drink blood out of crystal champagne flutes.
I ended up chatting with his girlfriend du jour for a few minutes — she was a statuesque, tawny-skinned German hottie in a midriff top and loose hippy pants with her blonde hair in a sloppy topknot, who had been happily putting on makeup in front of an old wooden vanity that, like everything else in Rubin’s purview, was showing wonderfully desirable patina and distress. She invited me in her charming broken English to a party at “Rick’s other house” that night — I graciously accepted, even though I knew I would be way too shy to actually go.
I wondered what the hell “Rick’s other house” looked like, since the one I was in was already the greatest palace I could have imagined. The way she said it, it sounded like the other one was the good house. My mind bent around itself trying to conceive of it.
Finally, one room utterly broke me. I’ve never had such a crazy full-body yearning for any material thing before in my life. It made me want to tear off my clothes and lunge at Rick Rubin shouting “Take me, fat boy. I want to swallow your beard.”
Across the hall from the little king’s bedroom, there was another room about the same size that had been entirely built to be one gigantic shower. Rubin had somehow sourced and acquired what looked like the tiled walls of at least eight different mosques, all exquisitely mismatched in full Islamic splendor, from floor to ceiling. There was a crazy network of brass piping and levers and faucets constructed over the tiles, that looked like it was installed by Monty Python; this was supporting at least fifteen different verdigris-splattered brass antique shower heads, in various sunflower sizes and angles. In short, it looked like a holy place to take a shower with four or five of your closest friends, where everyone would be hit with water from nearly every angle. In short, a deadly civilized place for an orgy of communal hygiene.
My goose was cooked. I cried, it was so beautiful. Rick Rubin looked at me quizzically, probably assuming that I had a terrible, pitiable life when it came to bathing — or knowing that all showers would be completely ruined for me forever after seeing the whimsy, artistry and opulence of this room.
Money, it cannot make you happy, but it can buy Rick Rubin’s shower….and that’s all I want. I’ve ached for it every day since I’ve seen it, the way some women yearn to have children.
The screenplay ended up being a bust — Halston informed me, after I finished it, that Sunset Boulevard is one of the most jealously protected intellectual copyrights on earth, and that swarms of legal flying monkeys would descend upon us and tear us limb from limb if we so much as thought about shooting it. C’est la vie de freelance.
But at least I got to see the way Rick Rubin lives — and if I ever make any money, ever again, I want everything in my world to look just like his. Whatever heaven Rick Rubin goes to — that’s where I want to go when I die (as long as I don’t have to listen to the Red Hot Chili Peppers all the time.) His taste, for me, is utterly peerless — like my taste walked into a phone booth as Clark Kent and his came out, as Superman. It was my love language, spoken in furniture, and oh Rick Rubin, I heard you, baby. Holler when you need a new wife.
Artwork: “Devki,” oil on linen by Cintra Wilson, 2020
I CRIED IN RICK RUBIN’S SHOWER