August 1974 - Creem Magazine

ELEMENTS OF STYLE

I was Afraid they’d All Be California Girls – by David Marsh.

I’ve always been amazed that there has never been a fashion magazine for the teenage trade, something which could exploit what passes for haute couture in the junior high school set. I don’t mean Rolling Stone need to be told about that? – but a pop Vogue, which can let the suburban demimonde know when snakeskin boots are outre and bare midriffs merely de rigeur, when too much mascara is in and when the natural look has run its course.

 In Los Angeles, where rivalary for the sleaziest style is most earnest, there was once (in 1972 and 1973) a splendidly vainglorious attempt at such a publication. It was called Star magazine and it nearly realized the ambition of every former boutique owner with a literary bent, and pushed, in the process, the truth of teen licentiouaness a little further into the open.

Star was a brilliant idea. One issue featured a "minute to minute Nose Job Diary," and in a quiz, there was always at least one mind blower question and answer. For example:

Q: You're at a drive-in movie with a Very Special Guy on your first date with him, and the movie is a real drag. Correct Answer: Suggest that the two of you check out the view from the backseat, and then read Star's movie review on the flick in case your mom asks you what it w about.

Such pandering deserved further investigation, I thought, and so I found myself in Los Angeles, last spring, walking among 14 year olds who could make 42nd St. woman of the night blush.

I already knew that Star had drawn its inspiration, at least in part, from the glitter crowd which frequented Rodney Bingenheimer's Enghish Disco, a sleazy bar on Sunset Strip which flaunted California's liquor laws with true impudence. Most Rodney's clientele were not only under 21, they were under 16. Many of his most interesting customers were only 14, and had been groupies, for real, since they were 11. Among them were the current girlfriend of the guitarist of a noted New York rock hand; a young woman who was featured in a movie which garnered an Academy Award nomination (and whose father would once have been considered a prime score by earlier groupies); a 14 year old who reported being engaged anally for more than four hours with an English pop star of mystic – and supposedly gay – bent; an authentic 12 year old who informed me that when her boyfriend asked which she had learned to do first, tie her shoes or give head, she had replied: "I learned to tie my shoes when I was 3. I didn't learn to give head until I was 11."

This Toulouse Lautrec setting has since been immortalized by a figure of kitsch no less patrician than Alan King, on one of his Wide World of Entertain ment spectaculars, which are fortunately aired well after the more corruptible elements – not to say innocent – of the television audience are theoretically safely abed. In fact, some of King's interviewees may not have been allowed to watch it, had they stayed home that evening, which they probably did not.

But King didn't really know what to do with these women, who will not dance with men – only each other – unless the stud in question is first of all, English, and most importantly, in a mascara rock band. Star did. It interviewed them, and photographed them, and generaly set them up as the prototype of the chic teenage female for however many hundred thousand readers its grocery store distribution provided it.

The Look, as encapsulated in its final issue: "She had on a black widow wide-brimmed hat over her kinky blonde natural. And a colorful Japanese looking kimono with wide-open slit sleeves exposing a tiny sequined vest and black bikini panties with a scarlet red garters holding up her black stockings. Too much for words. As for [her friend] – she wore a silver lame hot pants suit revealing incredibly spidery long legs on six inch silver wedgie platforms."

Too much for words? Hah! Those two are mild, just the center of the cyclone. Most of the girls I met at Rodney's were wearing their very best, miniscule bikini bathing suits, with perhaps a featter boa to ward off the desert chill. Their conversation had the same sense of decorurn Julie Christie displayed in McCabe and Mrs. Miller and even rock heroes weren't safe. A personage as seemingly omnipotent as Mick Jagger could be taken apart by a 15 year old (in Star) in short cutting sentences: "He looks just like a bellboy, he's nothing great at all! Mick is just ugly; dope has just eaten him apart. He's just really deformed looking. He just got his hair cut and it looked ugly, (Bianca) sounded like a man. She is a real shrew. All she wants is Mick's money."

This is tame. Another of the Rodney's crowd is reported to have shown up at the Jagger’s LA motel room, and, being told by Bianca that she should go play in the traffic like a good little kid, responded: "Oh, I wish you'd been in Nicaragua when the earthquake hit."

* * *

When I was on the Strip, the acknowledged Queen of the Foxes (fox was Star's term for its ideal girl) was 15 year old Sable Starr. She was tough and hard, a blonde minx, chestless and assless in the proper Fox tradition, but intensely erotic anyway. She carried intangible innocence the way she must have, not so long ago, carried a Barbie Doll. But her face, dotted with unregal acne – God, doesn't all that makeup even cover up the zits? – was so worn, she might as well have been 30.

Sable defined the style of the Strip. She hadn't anything in common with her hippie predecessors, the ones who crammed the Whiskey for the Byrds and caused so much commotion in the streets that they inspired the Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth." It is not quite true that Sable would sneer at members of either of those groups, but she wouldn't be very interested in them, either. First of all, they are old. Secondly, they are American.

The glitter girls think their style comes from England. But aside from a similar propensity for orthopedic platform shoes, kids in England just don't dress that way. The weather is too chill to allow bathing suits and hot pants to proliferate, and 15 year old girls in England couldn't get out of the house in them, if it weren't. In fact, the ultimate question may be how these giris manage to sneak past their mothers, not to mention how, in Los Angeles, where public transportation is almost nonexistent and they're too young to drive, they manage to get home at 4 AM. Or how they avoid going home at all. In London, where the tube stops at midnight, and working class girls have to rise early anyway, groupie-ism is for the older, leisure classes. In LA, where leisure is the most noticeable оссuраtion of the working classes, Sable and her friends might as well, so they do.

What they think of as English chic is really American cheapo. To dress the way the English starfuckers really do requires money heyond the means of 15 year olds anywhere. To grab a bathing suit, invent hot pants from tattered levis, to buy some Frederick's of Hollywood net nylons, is within the means of anyone. Because clothes are bait, because the tackily outrageous is more obvious, the highest fashion on the Strip is that which would seem crummiest anywhere else.

None of this has anything to do with androgyny, or unisex, of course. The purpose of the Strip's fashion is to expose flesh, bare the midriff and the thigh, to emphasize the difference. Androgyny is t-shirts and jeans, and in that sense Cambridge is far more unisexual than Hollywood can ever be. So are the Allman Brothers. But not David Bowie, or Lou Reed who can imagine mistaking either of them for women? Even in drag, they're dudes.

There are reasons, of course, why there are only a few teenagers, concentrated in Southern California, who have really bought the glitter fad. Part of it is just that they are able to get away with it but part of it too is that England is not one, but really two continents away from Hollywood. The glitter girls have no idea, because their ambition and tradition doesn't encompass it, what things must be like even in Iggy Pop's flat, depressing Midwest. If your father worked in the aerospace industry, the moon might seem much more attainable than London, or even New York. And of course, whatever anyone told you was British, would be.

Maybe Lou Reed was right: “The makeup thing is just a fad now, a style, like platform shoes. The notion that everyone's bisexual is a very popular line, but I think its validity is limited. I could say something like, if in any way my albums help people who decide who they are, then I will feel I have accomplished something in my life. But I don't feel that way at all. You can't listen to a record and say, 'Oh that really turned me on to gay life. I'm gonna be gay’.”

But of course, if you are 15, and not accustomed to thinking very deeply, you might not know that. I think my last encounter with Sable Star is illuminating. It was at a Dolls recording session, in Manhattan. I stared at her for five minutes, knowing I knew her, but not being able to place the face. Then suddenly I knew. That hard-faced girl from the Strip, come to evil New York, and living a supposedly decadent pop star life, away from the California sunshine, had somehow regained her innocence. She looked her age. I couldn't help wondering how many of the friends she'd left behind never would.

Photography by Julian Wasser.

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