March 12th, 2013
I’m bold sometimes. Shameless really. I had moved with my kids to Santa Monica, just a few blocks from a coveted, very hard-to-get-into nursery school. Circle of Children. I knew someone (hadn’t seen him in years) that was famous, actually, his wife was the famous one, and I read somewhere that their kid went to this school. I totally used the connection, dropping the name at my interview — without permission — and got myself, or rather my son Barnaby, in. I said I was shameless. A mother’s gotta do what a mother’s gotta do. Not only did I use that connection but I revealed to close friends my secret entree into this “private club” of a preschool, and they got their kids in too.
This place totally catered to celebrities, so much so, that when I met a big-name actress at a party, she told me she pulled her son from the school because of the obsequious manner in which famous parents there, including herself, were treated. And she is really famous, but it sickened her. And there was a hierarchy; we, the not-remotely-famous, were put in the lower, B group, and not with the A-listers. The parents of Barnaby’s group were television actors, or people who created TV shows, and losers like me. Barnaby was an outside kid. Literally, kept outside. Inside, with a roof over their heads, were the name kids. Each morning, I threw on my sweats (confession: I didn’t throw them on, I slept in them), pinned up my hair, applied no makeup and dropped my kid off, having to pass Spielberg, Rob Reiner, Tom Hanks and sometimes Schwarzenegger. Daily. Oy, it was annoying. Your kid is only three or four years old, you can’t just drop him on the corner and say good-bye. You had to park and walk in each day, passing these people like you were on a studio lot. Preschool is not AA, I can break anonymity here. At a certain point each day, the B group got to mix it up with celeb kids, and on one particular day when I went to fetch Barnaby, a teacher pulled me aside. Apparently Barnaby hit the Hanks kid. The teacher had both kids in tow. I looked down at my son and said, “Say you’re sorry to Chester, Barnaby.” “I’m sowwy, Chester.” “Great, let’s go.” I always wanted to get out of there fast. I felt like we were imposters. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: fredde duke, Freddie Duke, Freddy Duke, Libbie Lane clothes, Libbie Lane purses, Pea Soup recipe, preschool, pulling strings to get into schools, schools filled with celebs, treated like a second class citizen because you're not famous in Hollywood
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March 2nd, 2013
Not sure how I got roped into it, but it would be Easter vacation, and I was game to head with a group of friends to a hotel I knew and loved — The Riviera in Palm Springs. My friend Libbie and I hitched a ride. Not really hitched, but, you know, found someone driving there, and asked if they wouldn’t mind dropping us off. I didn’t do freeways, hated driving in general. So there we were. No car. But, at a great hotel with a pool, and that’s all I needed. Well, that and a good turkey sandwich. Or turkey club.
One of the girls’ dads had made all the arrangements and what Libbie and I paid was very low. Oh, by the way, this was a one-bedroom suite with way too many of us.
We parked ourselves on the couches and the rest took the bedroom. All good. We would wake up, drink our Cokes (at least that’s what I drank) and head to the pool. That pool area was a club scene. We girls were hot enough but there were hot girls and guys everywhere. Each lounge chair was taken. We all cared way too much about our tans. Baby oil, often mixed with iodine, and tanning cream was abundant. A sea of aluminum reflectors held under chins nearly blinded you in the already too-bright desert sun. The smell of Coppertone permeated the air. I put in record-breaking hours lying in that hot desert sun. (I now put in record-breaking hours at the dermatologist.) Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Amazing club sandwiches, baby oil and iodine sun burns, Beverly High friends, coppertone suntan lotion, Diana Boos, easter vacation, fredde duke, Freddie Duke, Freddy Duke, hot boys during spring break, Libbie Aroff, riviera hotel palm springs, Shula Benjamins, teen girls on wild vacation, very big tans in the 70's
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March 1st, 2013
There was one prerequisite for our birthday dinner for Robin. A red leather booth. Where to find one? So few places left with that old Rat Pack-era feel. I still miss them. One of my all-time favorites was Sneaky Pete’s. On the Sunset Strip. It was next door to Whisky A Go-Go, where Duke’s Coffee Shop was until recently. Waitresses were dressed in really short-skirt barmaid outfits. A place where Johnny Carson sometimes sat in on drums with the musicians. How great was that? Good that it’s been closed for a hundred years, or it might make me miss my father too much. I went there with him all the time for steak and a baked potato with tons of butter, sour cream & chives.
Peggy had gone last week to Dan Tana’s, the dimly lit, checkered-tablecloth, celeb- oriented Italian in West Hollywood. Libbie thought it was perfect for the Robin dinner. Since I never went to Dan Tana’s much back in the day, it would be a nostalgia-free zone – no memories with my dad to weigh me down. Still, I spent the rest of the week toying with the idea of changing restaurants. Many texts and phone calls back and forth between the girls. Robin said she would be just fine if we all met at Nate n’ Al’s, the Beverly Hills deli we all grew up in, but some of us just couldn’t envision a birthday celebration there. So, I never cancelled the reservation — and here is how retro Dan Tana’s is: they never called “to confirm.” Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Best Girlfriend dinners, Dan Tana's Restaurant, Food in the 70's, fredde duke, Freddie Duke, Freddy Duke, growing up in Beverly Hills, I want the 70's back!!!, Lawry's Restaurant, Ma Maison, Red Leather Booth's, retro restaurants Los Angeles, Scandia Restaurant
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February 14th, 2013
A random chick asked me to share a two-bedroom bungalow half a block from the beach on a Venice walk street. The year was 1979. There wasn’t much else going on. I was living in my friend’s kitchen that had I converted to a very small bedroom by simply hanging a Japanese print curtain next to the refrigerator. It was pretty ghetto. But it was easy reaching from my bed for a can of Tab, and I had a six-pack-a-day habit. Anyway, I can’t resist the beach, so I said yes. Problem was, I didn’t know this girl all that well. And soon learned there would be no chicks staying-up-all-night-in-PJ’s laughing. Turns out, she was a full-blown groupie. And an alcoholic. She spent her nights at a recording studio with some band that shared her in the late night hours. Most of her days were spent cleaning the recording studio. Not for money, just because she was a fan. My roommate was never home to pay her rent on time. And if she were home, she would start a fight to get out of paying the rent. Fun times.
I would spend hours listening to a new artist, Elvis Costello, and the song, “Watching the Detectives,” which I would play along with on my drum practice pad outside on the patio. It was a sorry little existence. I never felt safe alone at night, and I was pretty sure my big cat Cosmo, who went missing for hours at a time, had joined a gang. Some nights, I would go with my friend Pam to little bars and joints on the strand, Cosmo trailing behind us. Cosmo wore a scarf the way dogs did in that era, which means I put the scarf on him. He didn’t wake up in the morning and say, “Hey, I think I’ll sport this great red scarf today.” Cosmo would wait outside those little bars for us and then follow me home. By the way, I never drank, so I’m not sure what we were even doing in those joints. Something to get us out of the house, I guess. Most days I wore stars on my face. Sometimes I carried a wand. A combination of vintage and punk clothes was my wardrobe. I was very colorful. Speaking of colorful, the roomie once told me this story. Actually I had heard this story for years, I just didn’t know I was now living with a “famous” person. Or is infamous the better word. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Beef Su Chow at Ah Fongs in Beverly Hills, Beef Su Chow recipe by Pauli Moss, Chinese food, delusional director and personal assistants, famous groupies, fredde duke, Freddie Duke, Freddy Duke, living in Venice on walk streets in the 70's, wearing stars on my face
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February 2nd, 2013
You’ve heard it, opposites attract. My parents were just about the most opposite you could find. And, I never even thought about that until just now, while sitting down to write about their relationship. Your parents are the only parents you have, so you don’t stop to think, “What did they see in each other?”
My mother was quiet, elegant and intelligent. My father was loud, lovable and crass. Taste was not exactly his strong suit except, of course, his great taste in women.
They met at a party. He saw this stunning, very young, exotic looking woman modern-dancing. Alone. Seductively. Twenty years older, he was intrigued.
Cliff Notes to get you up to speed: They dated. He knocked her up. He said he didn’t want kids. She was set to have an abortion. Her family strong-armed him or he had a change of heart. Or both. She had their first child, my brother Alan but first they had a quickie wedding. In Vegas, where else? First meal in their home together, my mother cooked. My father complained about the way she made the eggs. She threw the whole pan of eggs at him. Two years after the first child, she was pregnant with me. I was a teeny tiny thing. Still am. She had taken the drug DES which would later be known to cause cervical cancer in the daughters of women who took it to prevent miscarriage. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: B-movie producer Maurice Duke, Divorced parents that got along well, Eveylyn Duke, fredde duke, Freddie Duke, Freddy Duke, marriage and divorce, Matzo brie recipe, Maurice Duke, My father married my mother twice, Raised in Beverly Hills, unconventional marriages
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January 19th, 2013
First Life
Lucy was abandoned by her mother at the age of two weeks. She was found next to a big trash bin in an alley in Beverly Hills.
Second life.
Emma, my stepdaughter begged her father to let her keep the kitten at his house in Coldwater Canyon. Lucy moves in to the Coldwater house and is helped by Emma to pee by rubbing low on her belly. Tiny circular strokes, the way a mother cat would lick a kitten to help teach their baby to pee. She is bottle-fed. After a few months she is fully realized kitten that can pee and eat on her own. She does not however fit in all that well. Lucy remains a feral. Docile at times, she is starting to lose her audience. Lucy is not a warm and cozy kitten that wants to be held. Let me put it this way…she wants to, but she will have to bite you.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: augie duke, cat obit, cats with more than 9 lives, feline obit, feral kittens, fredde duke, Freddie Duke, Freddy Duke, Friskies cat food, Iams cat food, Lucy our cat
Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments »
January 11th, 2013
Mary Lou Rutenberg painting of my stunning mother, Evelyn Duke, 1960’s
I posed nude, you know. Several times. Me and my two good buddies. All three chicks, totally naked. In a bathtub. It was for an artist who thought this would make a great painting. Or, perhaps, it was a commissioned painting. Either way, I was asked, and I was in. It got cold because we sat in that water for hours. Or did it only seem like hours? The two friends of mine were sisters, Lori and Lesly. I slept at their house a lot. We were kind of inseparable. Only, secretly, it was Lesly, the younger one, who I was closest to; she looked up to me because I was older. Lesly rocked herself to sleep in this crazy, enviably violent manner that totally intrigued me. I guess I should reveal that I was nine years old, though I was trying to figure out a way to tell the whole story without saying how old I was, to make it funnier. However, it’s probably not all that funny to imagine an adult woman after you hear the tale.
Here is what happened, one fateful day, in that water-filled tub. I farted. Yep. As a kid, I was pretty much constantly constipated. Truly, I spent my whole childhood blocked up, because I ate no fiber and consumed mostly mayonnaise sandwiches on white bread (which you would know, if you’re following my blog), so it’s not a surprise, really. There we three girls were that day, and when their mother, the artist, told us to get out of the bath, I looked back at the water and saw a turd floating about. A little rabbit sized pellet of a thing, just like the one that I was used to expelling — to use a polite word. I’m trying very hard to keep this polite and not say shit.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: fredde duke, great green bean with pistachio's recipe, Green Juice, growing up in Beverly Hills, Juice Crafters, Kreation, Mary Lou Rutenberg, paintings, posing nude for paintings, Pressed Green juices, Pressed Juicery, Roxbury park buddies
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January 1st, 2013
When I would visit my friend Lisa in London in the early 80’s, I would sometimes see my bi-country friend Allan. He lived here in L.A. and also London where he was a television producer. His flat was in the Holland Park/Notting Hill area, but I love the name Ladbroke Grove so much that I want to say he lived there. I love all the names of the streets and villages in Great Britain.
On occasion, he took me along for a Sunday lunch he had been invited to. Allan would say, “This bloke wants me to come round, would you fancy joining us?” Once there, I was in awe of the carefree, unkempt, unfazed style of the host, hostess and everyone really. When I entertain, I’m stressed out, dressed up, have too much food and am just generally overwhelmed by it all. Whereas, these folks looked like they stayed up too late (not a touch of makeup on the women) and hardly gave a thought to the guests they were now entertaining in their home. This was the antithesis of the Martha Stewart entertaining regime. The houses weren’t straightened up, nor the tables set. Drinks went around first. Drinks seemed much more important than food. Then slowly (sometimes hours had passed), and oh-so casually, the women would find their way to the kitchen and start hunting for leftovers. WHAT? They invited people over without even the forethought of what food they might serve. It was baffling. Then suddenly, from the refrigerator they would pull out a partially eaten baked potato, and other seemingly random items that might be thrown into the mix; an old cucumber here, a bit of a tomahto there. The women were like highly evolved ants or bees, each with her specific job to do. Finally, a very satisfying, thrown together, science experiment of a meal would be presented. It was outstanding. Unforgettable really, which is why I’m writing about it all these years later. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Best Cucumber and Egg sandwich, fredde duke, Freddie Duke Freddy Duke, friends in London, grateful for old friends, London in the early 80's, Lunches in London
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December 20th, 2012
One of the most memorable calls of my life was one that I picked up from my answering machine twenty-one years ago, Christmas Day.
It was my first Christmas alone after my husband had left me for another woman (READ THAT STORY HERE). I was still reeling from that hit — and not because we had some loving marriage, but because of the betrayal.
I had gone on two very casual dates with a new man. Didn’t know if there would be a third. First date was for lunch at the Broadway Deli in Santa Monica, the second was dinner at Remi, a great Italian restaurant. Both were on the Third Street Promenade, and are now gone. It was followed by a game of pool in a sports bar across the way. Throughout both dates, I kept the conversation going, filling in the empty spaces with my unique backstory – growing up in the slums of Beverly Hills, my one-of-a-kind, loudmouth producer dad, my quirky, Texas-born, goyishe mom. Yakety yakety yak. Was he even listening? Who knows? The first date was October 24th and the next was a few weeks later, in November. And that could have been that; it wasn’t exactly a relationship moving quickly or even a relationship at all. But, for some reason, I really liked those two dates, as they may have been the first dates in my whole life. When I was younger, you met someone — there were no dates – and just sort of moving in right away was the norm. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Broadway Deli on Third Street Promenade, first dates, fredde duke, Freddie Duke, goat cheese appetizer recipe from Remi Restaurant, half Jewish half gentile, Remi restaurant on third street promenade
Posted in Recipes, Reviews | 14 Comments »
December 12th, 2012
When I find myself in times of trouble Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
Oh, I was in trouble all right. “Grounded for life,” were the words my mother said.
And in my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be
I had switched parks. And friends. The new ones were stoners and longhairs. A wild bunch. I planned on having the time of my life. Experimenting. Transforming.
Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be Read the rest of this entry »
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