“Well?” Her mother shifted her weight from foot to foot, the sound of her nylons swooshing as her inner thighs scraped together. “What do you think?”
“You look good.” Sandra could hear her voice rise. It was her lying voice.
Her mother eyed her. “You aren’t going out with those kids tonight.” It was a statement, a warning, really.
Those “kids” were Hugh Markwell, Lily Leotta, and Ezra Gunn. Together the four of them had formed a band, No Exit. With the exception of Ezra, whose father was a somewhat famous television producer, Sandra’s parents hated these friends.
As with most parents, the murder of actress Sharon Tate by Charles Manson’s family of teenagers last August had unnerved them to the core. No Hollywood script could have produced something so terrifying as the actual murders and the macabre scenes at the courthouse with Manson’s followers carving symbols into their foreheads. It wasn’t the actual Tate murder that had unsettled her parents as much as the murders of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca the following night. The LaBiancas had been normal people who lived in the same Los Feliz neighborhood as the Keanes. Normal people just didn’t get murdered in their bedrooms in Los Feliz, so with pressing from her mother, the family had moved to a two-story Italian Revival house in Hancock Park and her mother bought two Boston terriers—Buster (as in Keaton) and Basil (as in Rathbone)—for protection.
As Sandra looked down at Buster and Basil, snoring on her parents’ bed and oblivious to her presence, she wondered what on earth those two could possibly protect.
In particular, her parents had taken one look at Hugh Markwell, with his dirty-blond hair and straggly brown beard, and determined he was exactly the kind of boy to lead their daughter astray. “That Hugh called earlier.” Her mother was now plucking her eyebrows.
“When?” Sandra leaned against the doorframe, trying not to act too interested.
“When I got home from work. I told him you weren’t here and that I didn’t know when you’d be back.” Her mother pivoted and faced her. “You know how we feel about that band of yours.”
The band was a sensitive subject. Sandra was the keyboard player, but that was being modest. Halfway through her first piano lesson at the age of ten she’d mastered “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and “Green Gravel” while the instructor was brewing a weak cup of coffee on the stove. By the second lesson, Sandra noticed that she felt an electricity coming from her fingertips, not unlike the feeling she got when she ran her socks over the carpet and touched the light switch. Within the hour, Sandra was playing sonatinas as easily as she could recite the alphabet. Her teacher, so animated about Sandra’s swift progress through the Hal Leonard instruction book, used words like “never seen anything like it before,” and “we need to take her to New York.” Sandra’s parents heard “savant” and wanted no part of some strange, unexplained talent that had sprouted overnight from their daughter’s fingertips. Despite Sandra’s begging and repeated calls from the teacher, they never took their daughter back for another lesson. Within a month they’d sold the piano to a family down the street. Sometimes Sandra would walk by and look at it through the window. So she took to playing alone at school and hiding the fact that she didn’t need lessons at all to master Chopin and Rachmaninoff by the age of eleven.
To avoid any further conversation with her mother about the band, Sandra changed quickly into a white gauzy top, grabbed her purse, and headed out the front door and down the steps to her car with a quick “Bye.”
The heat was stifling and she rolled down the window to let some air in the car. She was already late meeting Hugh, who was getting off his shift at Vogue Records in Westwood in an hour. Since they didn’t have a gig tonight, they were planning on practicing at Hugh’s place in Laurel Canyon before hitting the Strip to check out other bands.
As she pushed through the doors of Vogue Records, the bell jingled. Hubert Markwell III stood behind the counter, his dirty jeans and cowboy boots looking like he’d slept in them. Sandra was always surprised to see him with his shirt buttoned. Most days, he didn’t wear shoes.
For a Saturday, Vogue Records was dead. This was the place where everyone gathered to listen to new music that came out each week. From teenagers to rock stars who came in from neighboring Beverly Hills to pick up the latest, everyone knew Hugh. He walked over to the record player and, after searching for what seemed to be five minutes for what he wanted, placed a big stack of records on the player and set the arm. Dutifully, the record dropped from the stack and the familiar bars of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio” echoed through the shop.
When she’d first met him, Hugh grilled her about her own record collection, and she was afraid to admit that most of her stuff was classical piano—Debussy, Satie, and Chopin. The last album she’d purchased was Bobby Goldsboro’s Honey. So Hugh sat her down in front of his own collection asking her what she liked. He was satisfied enough that she’d liked the Rolling Stones, Eric Burdon and the Animals, and was a big fan of Ray Manzarek of the Doors.
As “Ohio” spun on the turntable, a small voice came from somewhere in the aisles. “That’s so groovy.” The voice belonged to a tiny thing with long brown hair and a cupid face. Lily Leotta seemed to float rather than walk through the aisles, wrapping herself in a Pendleton blanket over her T-shirt and bell-bottoms. She hugged Sandra tightly—something she did to everyone she met so she could feel their aura. Lily said she was from Florida although which part of Florida remained vague as did everything else about Lily, except that she seemed to know Hugh intimately and she’d lived in Los Angeles’s Laurel Canyon with a semi-famous musician before moving less than a mile down the road to live with Hugh instead. Hugh’s “place” in the Canyon was a tepee he’d built in his sister’s wooded backyard a little too near the fire pit than Sandra thought prudent, but Hugh didn’t concern himself with such things.
After Hugh’s replacement showed up, stoned and twenty minutes late (they were glad he showed at all), Sandra followed him and Lily up Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Finding Hugh’s house was tricky. It was a gingerbread cottage, brown and low, blending in with the trees just before Lookout Mountain Road where musicians like Joni Mitchell and Cass Elliot owned homes. The driveway was never marked, so the first thing Sandra always spied as a marker was the tepee sticking up past the house. With its tree houses and all-night partying, Laurel Canyon in some ways felt like a never-ending summer camp for adults. Never mind the fact that real kids were everywhere with their bikes littering the winding roads. The Canyon was magical.
While everyone called it Hugh’s house, the house actually belonged to Kim Markwell Nash, Hugh’s older sister. The prodigal children of an oil millionaire from Bakersfield, Kim was four years older than Hugh and a freelance writer. Kim’s husband, Rick Nash, was a photographer for the Los Angeles Times. Neither of those jobs would pay for a house like the one they rented in the Canyon, so Sandra knew that their dad was likely footing the bill for the place although Hugh was currently estranged from his father for marrying his mother’s nurse after her death two years ago. Kim, however, was still tight with her father, so according to Hugh the money still flowed.